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Rate of Half-million Deported Hungarian Jews Revealed; Most Cremaited in Oswiecim

April 20, 1945
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The mystory of what happened to the bulk of the 500,000 Jews deported from Hungary by the Germans was cleared up here today by one of the Jewish slave laborers from a munitions factory in Altenberg, who was freed yesterday by units of this division.

Ludwig Panko, a former Berlin economist, who was confined in the Oswiccim death camp in Poland before being sent to Germany for slave labor, reports that he, personally, saw a report concerning 350,000 Hungarian Jews who arrived at the camp. Of these, he said, 315,000 were cremated and 35,000 were sent to forced labor.

(London newspapers today carry extensive accounts of the horrors found by British correspondents at the concentration camps of Buchenwald and Bergen-Belson. At Buchenwald, a correspondent writes, when a man died in the “Jewish huts” his neighbors would prop up his body so as to continue to draw his rations. In Bergen-Bolson, another correspondent says, the Jewish inmates look like “hanging rags of striped cloth, as though heads were being paraded on poles.”)

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