A West German court, presided over by an Israeli magistrate, Yehoshua Auerbach, convened here today to hear the testimony of witnesses in the war crimes trial of Maidanek death camp guards. The witnesses are Israelis, all Holocaust survivors, who were unable to travel to Dusseldorf, West Germany, where the trial has been going on since 1975.
There are 14 defendants, five of them women, whose photographs were shown to the witnesses. One of the first to give testimony was 74-year-old Hanna Burstein-Band who related her experiences at Maidanek 35 years ago. She said she could not remember names. But she was able to identify the defendants from their photographs as camp guards who committed atrocities against the inmates. She pointed to the photo of one woman who, she recalled, was known as “the devil of Maidanek.”
The court will sit in Israel for several days before returning to Dusseldorf. It will reconvene in Israel in about three months to hear additional witnesses.
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