Detailed figures on the mass-annihilation of Jews in Europe under the direction of Adolf Eichmann, whose trial starts here tomorrow, are given in the indictment against him which Attorney General Gideon Hausner will present to the court probably on Friday. The indictment is divided into four parts and contains 15 charges. The categories are: offenses against Jews, offenses against humanity, war crimes, and membership in a hostile organization.
Eichmann is accused of having been the chief, from the beginning of World War II, of a special Gestapo department charged with assembling, deporting and killing Jews. He is held responsible for the murder by gassing (using Zyklon-B gas), shooting and hanging of millions of Jews in the camps of Auschwitz, Chelmo, Belsen, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Maidanek, cooperating with four Operational Groups which worked in various parts of Eastern Europe occupied by the Germans. The numbers of Jews killed in the Baltic States, Byelorussia, the Ukraine and other areas are given.
He is further charged with having caused the death or danger to the life and health of Jews or serious harm, suffering and anguish to Jews by confining them under inferior living conditions, as in forced labor camps, ghettos, concentration camps or deportation transports. He likewise devised measures designed to prevent child-bearing and caused the sterilization of members of mixed marriages among Jews in Germany and neighboring countries, as in the Theresienstadt camp and the Kovno ghetto.
The indictment also charges Eichmann with causing the spoliation of the property of millions of people, including Jews, by inhuman means, terror, etc., by utilizing the “Judenrat” and similar cover organizations, for the seizure of property and money. He is also accused of causing extortion from Jews, and the collection of the bodily properties, such as false teeth and false limbs, of murdered Jews.
INDICTMENT LISTS KILLING OF 363,000 JEWS IN THREE MONTHS
In giving the details of the mass-murder of Jews, the indictment says that four operational Nazi groups cooperated with Eichmann in the extermination of Jews in Nazi-held countries since the invasion of the German Army into these countries. The activities of such groups included, among other things, the following acts:
1. Operational Group ‘A’–During the first four months of the invasion, this group exterminated in Lithuania more than 80,000 Jews; in Latvia more than 30,000 Jews; in Estonia about 470 Jews; in Byelo-Russia more than 7,600 Jews; in Russia about 2,000 Jews; in the District of Tilsit about 5,500 Jews–a total of more than 135,000 Jews.
2. Operational Group ‘B’–Up to November 14, 1941, this group exterminated more than 45,000 Jews in Byelo-Russia and other areas.
3. Operational Group ‘C’–Up to November 3, 1941, this group exterminated more than 75,000 Jews in the Ukraine, including 33,000 Jews of Kiev.
4. Operational Group ‘D’–Up to December 12, 1941, this group exterminated about 54,000 Jews.
“During the period from August to November 1942, the operational groups referred to above exterminated some 363,000 Jews,” the indictment points out. The operational groups operated in the same manner and for the same purpose in the said districts in the extermination of the Jews from June 1941 until 1944, and exterminated hundreds of thousands of Jews in addition to those detailed above.”
KILLING OF HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF JEWS IN FORCED LABOR CAMPS CITED
The indictment also charges Eichmann with ordering, at the end of 1941, the deportation of thousands of Jews from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia to ghettos in Riga, Kovno and Minsk. These Jews were exterminated as were a number of Jews deported from the Reich (Germany) on November 30, 1941 together with some 4,000 Jews from Riga.
Some 3,500 Jews from Germany, who were sent to Minsk pursuant to Eichmann’s instructions were exterminated by an operational group in Byelo-Russia together with 55,000 more Jews who were residents of that district, the indictment adds.
During the years 1940-1945, Eichmann together with others, caused the killing of hundreds of thousands of Jews in forced labor camps which were conducted on the lines of concentration camps, and in which such Jews were enslaved, tortured and starved to death in Germany, and in countries occupied by Germany, according to the indictment.
Eichmann is also charged that he, together with others, caused the killing of still more hundreds of thousands of Jews during the years 1939-1945 in Germany and the other Axis countries, and the areas occupied by them, by their mass deportation and concentration in ghettos and other concentration points under cruel and inhuman conditions, in the following countries: Germany, Austria, Italy, Bulgaria, Belgium, USSR and the Baltic States, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia which were annexed to the USSR, and that part of Poland which was annexed to the USSR after September 1939, Denmark Holland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Greece, Luxemburg, Monaco, Norway, Poland, Czechoslovakia, France, Rumania.
“The accused caused the killing of some half a million Hungarian Jews by means of their mass deportation to the extermination camp at Auschwitz and other places during the period from March 19, 1944 to December 22, 1944 at a time when he acted as head of the ‘Eichmann Special Operations Unit’ (Sondereinsatz-Kommando Eichmann) in Budapest. All the acts mentioned in this count were committed by the accused with the intention of destroying the Jewish people,” the indictment emphasized.
As far as other peoples are concerned, Eichmann is charged with having caused the deportation to Germany and other areas of half a million Poles between 1940 and 1942, sending them to slave labor enterprises or abandoning them. Likewise he is charged with having caused the deportation of 14,000 Slovenes to Yugoslavia in 1941, and tens of thousands of gypsies to murder camps in Eastern Europe. In 1942, he caused the murder in Poland, after deportation there, of 100 children from the Czech village of Lidice.
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.
