Second ‘auschwitz Trial’ to Open in Germany; 20 Defendants Involved

A second Auschwitz murder camp trial, involving 20 defendants, will open here as soon as the current case against 22 former guards and officers is completed, a district court spokesman announced today.

Reporting that preliminary investigation into the cases of the 20 defendants had been completed, he said the trial could begin immediately but the delay was forced by the lack of courtroom facilities. The defendants in the forthcoming Auschwitz trial include former SS men up to the rank of major and two former inmates, both criminal prisoners.

Charges and evidence in the case already fill 20 volumes and hundreds of former Auschwitz inmates have been questioned in investigations that included research in Israel, Poland, East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Only three of the 20 defendants are in pre-trial confinement, the other 17 having been released on bail.

Among the 20 are the former labor chief of the camp at Birkenau and two commandants of subsidiary camps in the huge murder complex. Four are former SS truck drivers charged with aiding and abetting murder by transporting inmates to the gas chambers in trucks. As compensation for this work, they received extra rations of food and whiskey.

Other defendants are members of the camp secret police, and a medic responsible for making up the duty roster of the hospital and medical staff. This roster listed the camp doctors and medical assistants assigned to take part in selection for gassing of inmates arriving at Birkenau and those assigned to supervising the gas executions. One of the two criminal inmates is charged with having murdered Fritz Beda-Loehner, the librettist of operetta composer Franz Lehar.

DEFENDANT AT CURRENT AUSCHWITZ TRIAL ADMITS KILLING INMATES

Meanwhile, at the trial against 22 guards and officers of the Auschwitz camp, Josef Klehr, 59, a carpenter who served in the camp for four years as a medic, today admitted killing 250 inmates over a two-month period by giving them injections of phenolic acid directly into the heart. In addition to charges that he killed or aided in the murder of thousands of inmates, he is charged with pushing a Jewish woman and her daughter, who had refused to separate on their arrival, into a crematorial pile.

“When I first arrived at Auschwitz,” he testified, “I was an eyewitness to injection killings of many inmates in the hospital block. However, they were not killed by SS men but by one of the inmate assistants, Peter Bock, who was the block elder. I saw him lead numerous naked inmates into the cellar and give them injections in their arms.”

Presiding Judge Hans Hofmeyer asked: “What were you doing at the time?” Klehr replied that he watched the assistant. “I didn’t want to have anything to do with it but about two months after I arrived, I was ordered to give the injections myself. The SS doctor told me either I would give the injections or he would have me shot at the black wall. I did as I was told.”

His admission that he had killed more than 250 inmates by such injections in two months fell far short of charges against him. He is accused of murdering that many inmates on Christmas Eve, 1942 alone.

Another defendant, Dr. Viktor Capesius, 56, a prosperous pharmacist, today claimed he was drafted into the Nazi SS from the Rumanian Army and denied today at the trial all charges against him. He is accused of having selected prisoners for the camp’s gas chambers, of sending 1,200 children to their death, of ordering the phenolic acid with which thousands of inmates were injected and killed and with giving two prisoners a lethal mixture of coffee and drugs.

Judge Hofmeyer told him “there are witnesses who will come here to say you did many of these things. There are witnesses who will testify that you were on duty on the ramp at Birkenau and other witnesses who saw you forcibly break up families, sending mothers and children to the gas chambers.”