Dr. Albert Wittman, a chemist who was an officer of Hitler’s SS during the war, went on trial here yesterday on charges of murder of Jews and of being the scientist who had developed the Nazi system of asphyxiating people in trucks equipped with gas exhausts. The trial is expected to last about six weeks.
Wittman, 54, was accused by the prosecution, as the trial opened, of being responsible for the creation of the murder trucks in which, it was charged, “thousands of people perished.” The court was told that he had devised the “speediest” method whereby victims could be killed by gas exhausts fed into the bodies of the trucks. As part of his work, it was stated, he had conducted experiments in the Minsk and Moghilev areas occupied by the German army in Russia in 1941.
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