U.S. Jew, Suing German Trust, Tells Court of Nazi Tortures

For the second time since he brought suit against the IG Farben chemical trust for $200,000 in back pay and damages, Pfc. Rudolf Wachsmann of the United States Army, described to an American court the tortures he underwent as a prisoner of the Nazis and a slave laborer at IG Farben’s synthetic rubber plant at Monowitz, adjoining the notorious Osweicim concentration camp.

In a seven-hour session in the witness chair in the U. S. High Commission Court at Mannheim, Pfc. Wachsmann showed the scars on his body from continuous torture and beatings, as well as the camp number tatooed on his arm by the Nazis. He testified that he was hung from the wrists at least 20 times and that he weighed 72 pounds when he was liberated.

Counsel for IG Farben, which included three of Germany’s outstanding defenders of major war criminals, cross-examined Pfc. Wachsmann throughout the seven hours of testimony. Under questioning he said that he had not been tortured by IG Farben employees but insisted that the punishment resulted from complaints by IG Farben straw bosses to the Nazi guards at the camp.

In response to questions of why, if he had suffered such severe injureis, he had not remained in the camp hospital for longer periods than the records showed, he pointed out that the inmates knew that as a rule any prisoner who spent more than two weeks in the hospital, regardless of the cause, was sent to the gas chambers. He said that in order to spend more time in the hospital he had assumed, for various periods, the identity of prisoners who had died.

The lawyers then suggested that he could not have suffered so severely in body and mind, as he claimed, if the U.S. Army had drafted him. Pfc. Wachsmann produced Army records to show that he had been found fit for limited duty only and that he had suffered constant headaches after exertion and that he had also been excused from wearing a steel helmet because of the suffering it caused him.