Attorney General Gideon Hausner today pinned squarely upon Adolf Eichmann two orders for the execution of Jewish concentration camp prisoners. He bolstered his accusations against Eichmann by introducing an order from Gestapo Chief Heinrich Himmler, giving to Eichmann the direct authorization for the execution of Jewish prisoners both inside the camps and outside the death factories.
As the court trying Eichmann for crimes against the Jewish people and crimes against humanity opened its fourth week this morning, Mr. Hausner presented evidence which was seen as demolishing Eichmann’s claims that he was “only a-transport officer” and acted as “a small sausage” merely carrying out orders from higher-ups in the Nazi apparatus.
The documents submitted by Mr. Hausner, to which Robert Servatius, chief of defense counsel, promptly objected, opened a session of the court filled with more drama and choked with more emotion than seen here yet in the quiet courtroom since Eichmann went on trial here on April 11.
For the first time since the trial opened, two persons in the visitors’ gallery lost self-control and shouted out, one of them hurling the word “bloodhound” at Eichmann. Both were ejected promptly, but not until one of them had fainted twice.
GOLDA MEIR WEEPS IN COURT; MOVED BY TESTIMONY OF NAZI ATROCITIES
Presiding Justice Moshe Landau cautioned all in the courtroom to remain seated, and instructed guards to remove the-interrupters. Eichmann, in his bullet-proof, glass-enclosed dock, tightened his steel-like stare. Dr. Servatius paled visibly. In a side seat in the press section, where she had taken a place quietly, trying to act inconspicuously, Mrs. Golda Meir, Israel’s Foreign Minister, wept bitterly.
Four men were on the stand this morning providing eyewitness accounts of events they had lived through under the Nazi regime in Galicia and in Poland. They testified after Mr. Hausner had quietly introduced the documents showing Eichman’s direct responsibility for murders.
Copies of two telegrams signed by Eichmann–one dated March 27, 1942 and the other dated May 6, 1942–were read into the court record by Mr. Hausner. Both wires were labeled “special treatment of the Jews.” One of the telegrams named four Jews, the other provided seven specific names. The messages ordered that the men named be hanged “in the presence of members of their race.” “I demand a report on this execution,” Eichmann had stated in each of the wires, signing them with his name and the words “by order.”
Mr. Hausner, who told the court he had received the copies of both telegrams from the Polish Government, then set out to prove that Eichmann had the authority to order executions. He put into the record an order signed in January 1942, by Gestapo Chief Himmler, instructing that prisoners be executed by fellow-prisoners who should be “rewarded for their work” with three cigarettes for each murder. Then came the clincher implicating Eichmann. Himmler’s order stated specifically that the “head of Section Four should give the orders for the execution of prisoners both-inside and outside the camps.” Eichmann was the head of the section, numbered IV-B-4.
58 MEMBERS OF ONE JEWISH FAMILY EXECUTED IN ONE DAY
Yaacov Gurfein, a former Hungarian Jew, took the witness stand and started describing how he had escaped from a train taking Jews to the death camp at Belsen. A man in the visitors’ gallery, moved by the testimony, shouted: “Bloodhound! My whole family was killed.” As court guards reached the man, he fainted. Then he regained consciousness, murmured “brothers–where are you?” and fainted again.
Outside the courtroom he was identified as Zvi Sheffer. He said 58 members of his family, including both his parents, had been killed by the Nazis in one day. Sheffer begged the police to permit him to re-enter the courtroom, promising to make no further disturbance. But his request was denied when he demanded to know: “Why didn’t they kill him? Why did they bring him to trial? If I can only strike him once.”
Meanwhile the trial went on. Gurfein, who lives now in Tel Aviv, described how 1,300 Jews were rounded up at Sanok, Galicia, and herded into ten railroad cars marked “eight horses, 40 men.” He said there were 103 persons in the car into which he had been ordered. After three days and two nights at a camp at Zaslow without food and drink and without sanitary facilities, he said, the train started again, on its way to Belsen. All, he said, realized they were on the way to a death camp. Some of the Jews broke windows and leaped off the moving train, only to be shot down by members of the Nazi Elite Guard who had mounted machineguns on the roofs of the cars.
Gurfein, who was then 21, said he had been “half-pushed, half urged” by his mother to try to escape. He jumped, was shot at, but the shots missed him. He said he never saw his mother again. After he had leaped from the train, he made his way to Przemyzl, a famous, pre-war center of Jewish life, but found that there was not a Jew left in the town. Posing as a Gentile, he made his way across Hungary, into Turkey, and finally reached Palestine.
WITNESSES TESTIFY ON NAZI SADISM; RELATE INHUMAN ACTS
Noah Zabludowitz, 42, an electric worker now living in Israel, took the stand after Gurfein. He told how the Nazis at Chechanov, Poland, near the German border, once forced several Jews publicly to exchange wives in front of their children. He related how he was arrested and the Nazis tried to force him to reveal the names of Jews listening to foreign broadcasts. He was beaten, subjected to tortures, but refused to admit he knew anything about Jews listening to the forbidden broadcasts. He testified that, of 6,000 Jews in his town, all but 80 had been sent to Auschwitz.
Another Israeli, Zvi Pachter, formerly of Hrubeshov, Poland, near Lublin, related how, one Saturday morning in 1939, all Jews had been rounded up by the Gestapo. Money and watches, and all other possessions but 20 zlotys per person, were confiscated. They were ordered to march, on the road to Chelm. They were told not to talk or to turn around, or they would be shot. One girl ran along the line of marching Jews crying, “tateh, tateh” (daddy, daddy). Pachter heard some shots, and the girl’s cries stopped.
Pachter said he saw one bearded Jew summoned by the Gestapo from the ranks, and saw the man’s son jump in front of his father, yelling “take me.” Both were shot. He testified that he heard guards comparing notes on how many each of them had shot, one guard claiming 89 murders, another boasting of 102.
On the third day of the march, testified Pachter, he saw an officer toss a piece of bread to a 15-year-old boy. When the child stooped to pick up the bread, the officer shot him. Pachter finally escaped when the marchers reached the Russian border. He joined the Russian underground, and spent the rest of the war as a partisan with the Russians. During Pachter’s testimony another man started shouting in the visitors’ gallery. He was taken out quietly.
SPECTATORS CRY, LISTENING TO EXPERIENCES IN NAZI DEATH CAMP
Perhaps the most moving of all the testimony heard today came from a dignified Tel Aviv magistrate, Dr. Moshe Bielski. A thoroughly trained jurist, Dr. Bielski gave his testimony in a voice that started out as coldly calm, but he soon lost his courtly demeanor and wound up suffocated with emotion.
Dr. Bielski described his experiences in the death camp of Plashow. There, he said, the “standard” punishment for not walking fast enough or possessing an “illegal” piece of bread was shooting. He described how Jews were sent into work battalions outside the camp with relatively small details of guards. The reason, he said, was that, if someone escaped, all the remaining members of the work battalion would be shot. It was this “collective responsibility” that kept Jews from trying to escape, he said.
Dr. Bielski testified that the “minimum punishment” for trying to bring “illegal” food into the camp was 50 whiplashes “if the camp commander was in a good mood.”
Spectators throughout the courtroom cried when Dr. Bielski described now a 15-year-old boy was hanged once in front of 20,000 camp inmates. The boy had been “caught” humming a Russian tune. Dr. Bielski told how the hangman’s rope broke before the boy was dead, how SS men beat the boy, forced his head into the noose again, and finally succeeded in hanging the child.
“How did it happen?” asked Mr. Hausrer, “that 20,000 prisoners, watching this scene, did not try to overcome the several hundred guards, even though they were armed?”
Choking, his words barely audible by that time, Dr. Bielski replied: “Nobody can attempt fully to describe, much less explain here in this courtroom, what went on in Plashow. Machineguns were trained straight at the prisoners who, by that time, had already spent three years in the Nazi hell. We hoped that the war was near its end. But even if we could have overpowered the guards, could we escape?”
GESTAPO ‘CELEBRATED’ YOM KIPPUR BY SHOOTING BEARDED JEWS
Dr. Bielski gave the court the exact names of some of the victims and some of the SS officers who committed the atrocities. He told of SS men “celebrating” Yom Kippur in 1943 by rounding up 50 bearded, Orthodox Jews and shooting them. The witness told the court: “The author of the High Holy Day prayer, who had written the litany ‘who will die by water and who by fire,’ could not have imagined so many forms of tortuous death invented by the Nazis.”
He told of the camp command playing Yiddish lullabies over the loudspeakers as they loaded 200 children aboard railroad cars destined for the death camp at Auschwitz. He told of an SS camp doctor “selecting” 20,000 inmates in a few hours, saying these people would be assigned to “light work.” That, he said, happened in 1944, when the camp was being evacuated. The selectees were sent to the Auschwitz gas chambers. He further mentioned that SS officers used Jews as target practice.
AMERICAN JEW TESTIFIES ON TORTURE OF JEWS IN LWOW
When the session reconvened for the afternoon, Presiding Justice Landau observed he was not certain the court could listen to recitals of further atrocities. However, Mr. Hausner put on, as his next witness, an American, Dr. Leon Wells, of Fort Lee, New Jersey, a New York suburb. Dr. Wells, whose name used to be Winziger, is a mechanical engineer. The only survivor of a family of 76 persons in Lwow Poland, (Lemberg), Dr. Wells arrived here by air this morning to testify for the prosecution.
Testifying in precise English, Dr. Wells told how, immediately after Lwow had been occupied by the Germans in 1939, Ukrainian militia rounded up 5,000 Jews and turned them over to the SS command. The latter assembled the Jews in a large courtyard, and forced them to lie on the ground, face down. During the night, German soldiers beat one Jew then another. When dawn came, and the Jews were permitted to sit up, several hundred were dead, their skulls crushed. The living were told to sit still, among the dead. Without water or food, the Jews sat there until nightfall, when the beatings and killings were resumed.
Dr. Wells described various other actions against the Lwow Jews which, he said, were carried out by the SS command but with the assistance of the Ukrainian militia. Finally, Wells, with other Jews, was taken to a concentration camp at Yanowka. There, the Jews were issued about a quart of water a day for drinking and washing. An SS commander named Gebauer, said Dr. Wells, examined each prisoner to see whether he had washed thoroughly. Those whom Gebauer considered “unclean” were immersed in water tanks overnight, in freezing weather. By morning, in each case, those immersed had been frozen to death.
Later, Dr. Wells told the court, another SS officer, named Wilhaus, joined the command. Then Wilhaes and Gebauer engaged in target practice, using the noses and fingertips of Jews as their targets. Some of the wounded, he said, were shot to death; others were strangled to death by Gebauer.
Dr. Wells finally led up to his own escape from Yanowka. It happened because he was one of 180 prisoners who had contacted typhus or pneumonia. He was in a high fever, he said, when he was ordered to shovel sand on two Jews already placed into a grave alive, and to place a dead Jew atop the living. “My fever was so high,” he testified, “that I prayed to be allowed to draw my own blood to quench my thirst.”
But at that moment, he stated, the SS officer in command of the operation turned his back. Young Wells dropped the corpse he was dragging, ran toward a Jewish work battalion nearby, and hid among the workers. He feared only that, if he was reported to have escaped, other Jews would be shot. But then he found out later that he had been reported dead.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
