Wilhelm Burger, 61, an official at the Auschwitz death camp charged with providing the poison gas used to kill millions of victims there, sobbed in self-pity in the dock as the second trial of Auschwitz personnel began here today.
Wringing his hands, he denied doing any wrong and stammered that “I…we…didn’t know about all the killing”–a statement that moved presiding Judge Emil Opper to tell the former Nazi “I don’t believe you.”
Burger is one of three defendants in the current trial. The other two are Gerhardt Neuberg, 56, charged with complicity in selecting victims, and Joseph Erber, 68, charged with selecting women for death. Between 3,000,000 and 4,000,000 victims, most of them Jews, died at the death camp during the war.
Last August, after a trial that lasted 21 months, six of 20 Auschwitz staff members were sentenced to life imprisonment at hard labor, 10 received varying terms, one received a special sentence because he was a minor at the time and three were acquitted. The indictment charged that Burger ordered and kept records on the Zyldon-B gas, as well as with joining with the other former SS men in picking victims for death.
Weeping throughout his testimony, Burger testified he had been without work in 1932 and thus joined the SS. He sobbed as he told of his postwar days in American and Polish jails. His tears rolled down his cheeks as he contended he only supplied food and housing for SS and Gestapo men stationed at the death camp in occupied Poland.
West German popular resentment over the war crimes trials and the hostile reactions they generate in other countries was manifested in the sparse attendance at the opening trial session when only about one fourth of spectator seats were filled. The trial is being conducted in a side street courtroom. A Jewish survivor who is now residing in the United States is scheduled to open prosecution testimony on December 28. He is Norbert Wollheim of Fresh Meadows, N. Y.
Meanwhile it was officially announced in Bonn today that more than 100 tape recordings of the testimony of all witnesses who appeared at the last long trial of Auschwitz death camp personnel will be preserved for use in possible future investigations.
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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.
