The crimes against humanity committed at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp by the Gestapo were so monstrous as to be beyond comprehension, the state’s attorney declared today in his summation at the trial of former camp guards Wilhelm Schubert and Gustav Sorge.
The average span of life of a prisoner coming through the gates of the death center, the prosecution estimated, was but nine months–and every hour of it a living hell.
The prosecutor pointed out that by even the standards of the Gestapo the defendants, charged with the murder of 11,000 men, women and children–many of them Jews–were criminals. But, he pointed out, the German stature of limitations had intervened and they could not be prosecuted for any of their crimes except murder. At one point, the attorney attempted to excuse the German people as a whole in the matter of war crimes, asserting that what went on behind the concentration camp barbed wire was unknown to the people at large.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
