The possibility of a mistrial developed today in the hearing against 12 former SS guards of the Chelmno extermination camp when three of the defendants became ill and the proceedings were suspended. Under West German criminal proceedings, if the trial cannot be resumed within 10 days, the trial will have to be ended and then taken up as a new procedure.
Prior to the suspension yesterday, David Gaertler, now of Munich, who had been in charge of food distribution in the Lodz ghetto, testified. The defendants are charged with participation in the wartime slaughter of 170,000 Jews at the camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Gaertler testified that at the end of 1940 there were 150,000 Jews in the Lodz Ghetto. At the end of 1941, he said roughly 20,000 Jews from Vienna, Berlin, Frankfurt, Cologne, Hamburg and Dusseldorf, 5,000 from Prague and 8,000 from the Lodz region had been added. All of them, he said, were shipped to Chelmno and there murdered.
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