U.S. Prosecutor Thomas Dodd today confronted Baldur von Schirach, former gauleiter of Vienna and one-time Nazi youth leader, with documents proving that he had arranged for the deportation of 50,000 Jews to extermination camps in Poland. Dodd submitted to the International Military Tribunal the minutes of a meeting of Hitler, Hane Frank, then gauleiter of Poland, and Schirach, at which Schirach asked Frank to accept 50,000 Viennese Jews.
Schirach denied that he knew what had happened to the deportees, stating that he believed the older people were sent to Theresienstadt, while the younger ones were sent to Poland. Dodd interrupted, declaring: “You know that the Jews were taken to Riga and Minsk and annihilated.”
Dodd quoted from 55 reports submitted to Schirach in 1942 by Reinhard Heydrich, who was at the time deputy chief of the Gestapo, giving full details of the massacre of he deported Jews. The prosecutor remarked that “your memory is very bad today,” when the former youth leader said that he could not remember having seen the reports.
The Russian prosecutor following Dodd, submitted excerpts from an affidavit by Ida Wassotom, a Jewish resident of Lemberg, relating how members of the Hitler youth groups, which Schirach directed, had participated in the murder of hundreds of Jews in that city. Uniformed youths, armed with knives and pistols, she said, reamed the streets, breaking into homes to search for hidden Jews and killing Jewish men and women on the streets.
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.
