German Government Organ Publishes Study on Terezin Ghetto-camp

The official government weekly “Das Parlament” has distributed, as a special 14-page supplement, an absorbing study by Dr. H.G. Adler, of London, on the role of the Terezin ghetto-camp in the Nazis’ “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.”

Dr. Adler, an inmate of Terezin for three years and of other concentration camps as well , is a 45-year-old native of Prague. The present study is based on his monumental and documented work dealing with the history, sociology and psychology of the Terezin ghetto-camp, which a German publisher is bringing out this fall, with financial support from the “Federal Central Bureau for Domestic Service,” a Bonn Government agency concerned with popularizing the democratic idea among the German people.

The Bureau, which sponsors “Das Parlament,” has already published a special issue on Israel and, also in supplement form, a meritorious study on the number of Jewish victims of Nazism.

Terezin was a small Bohemian fortress town 40 miles both from Prague and from Dresden, with an original population of some 6,000 soldiers and civilians, before the Nazis turned it into a ghetto-camp in early 1942. During the next three years 141,000 Jews were imprisoned there: 34,000 died in the camp and 19,000 survived. Of the 88,000 who were deported from Terezin to other camps such as Auschwitz, no more than 3,500 escaped the gas chambers.

At the time of the liberation in May 1941, administration of the Terezin ghetto-camp was in the hands of an inmate council under the chairmanship of Rabbi Leo Baeck, dean of the Liberal rabbinate. Because of rampant typhus, the survivors had to be quarantined for several weeks. Only then was it possible to dissolve the one concentration camp which, Dr. Adler concludes, had been deliberately designed by the Nazi inner circle to cloak, during the transition period when such camouflage still seemed advisable, the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” that spelled mass murder.