Author: Webb

Magically efficient Nazi pneumonia

Dated:

“The Russians were coming [toward Auschwitz/Birkenau] and the SS wanted the children destroyed. Most of them were Polish; the Jewish children were already dead. They thought of burning them alive in a pit, or shooting them, but they decided to do something that wouldn’t show too many marks and evidence. So in the freezing cold they marched the children down to the river and made them take off their clothes and soak them in the water as if they were washing them, and then made them put on these wet clothes again. Then they marched them back to the area in front of the barracks where they had been living and had a roll call. Standing in their wet clothes. The roll call lasted for many, many hours while the children stood wet and freezing and night came. All of the children died of being exposed that day. They died of exposure and pneumonia, very fast.”

Source: William Styron, Sophie’s Choice, London: Cape, 1979.

German Corpse Factories

Dated:

Even the most popular atrocity story of all — the German corpse factory — turned out to be another war correspondents’ invention. This particular story had a long and highly successful run. It had several variations, but basically it was that close behind their front line the Germans had established factories for boiling down the corpses of their soldiers, from which to distill glycerine for munitions. The Times initiated the story, on April 16, 1917, with a suspiciously vague paragraph that said baldly: “One of the United States consuls, on leaving Germany in February, stated in Switzerland that the Germans were distilling glycerine from the bodies of their dead.” The account quickly blossomed. The Times expanded the original report by reproducing a dispatch by a German correspondent, Karl Rosner, in which he referred to the German army’s Kadaververwertungsanstalt, which The Times translated as “Corpse Exploitation Establishment.” Foreign newspapers picked up the story. It appeared in LInde’pendance and La Belge, two Belgian newspapers published in France and Holland. French correspondents were instructed by their army authorities to send dispatches to their newspapers over their own signatures detailing what was known about the corpse factories. The matter came up in the House of Commons on April 30, when the Prime Minister was asked if he would make the story known as widely as possible in Egypt, India, and the East generally. A corpse-factory cartoon appeared iii Punch, and in general the affair had world-wide circulation and considerable propaganda value.

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Breathing through keyholes in the Flossenburg gas chamber

Dated:

I stayed in the hospital [At the Flossenburg camp] for three days and had good food and a rest. The S.S. would come in twice a day and take away some men. A few times they would come past my bed, but they would take the man next to me. Then one evening, a lot of S.S. walked into the room and they ordered us to follow them. They ordered us into a room and locked the door. I heard a noise like a snake hissing, and then I heard the slave laborers shouting, “They are gassing us!” I smelled an awful odor. Some of the men dropped dead. The rest of us ran around the room cursing the Nazis.

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Toxicity of diesel exhaust

Dated:

It has been suggested that fumes from diesel engines make an important contribution to atmospheric pollution. This is probably because they are sometimes highly irritant and sometimes very smoky. It is well known that, because of their comparatively low carbon monoxide content, these fumes are much less lethal than those from petrol engines.

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Post-war American atrocities in Germany

Dated:

AMERICAN investigators at the U. S. Court in Dachau, Germany, used the following methods to obtain confessions: Beatings and brutal kickings. Knocking out teeth and breaking jaws. Mock trials. Solitary confinement. Posturing as priests. Very limited rations. Spiritual deprivation. Promises of acquittal. Complaints concerning these third degree methods were received by Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall last Spring [1948]. Royall appointed Justice Gordon Simpson of the Texas Supreme Court and me to go to Germany and check up on the reports. Accompanied by Lt. Col. Charles Lawrence, Jr., we went to Munich, Germany, set up offices there, and heard a stream of testimony about the way in which American atrocities were committed.

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300,000 deaths at Auschwitz

Dated:

In Kraków the trial of the principal culprits for the Auschwitz concentration camp came to an end before a Polish court. The Defendants were German camp guards or members of the German camp administration staff.

Unheard-of atrocities against the camp inmates, particularly against female prisoners, were proved against them. Altogether nearly 300,000 people from the most different nations died in the Auschwitz concentration camp. The court sentenced 23 of the accused to death, six to life sentences and 10 to lengthy jail terms; one was acquitted.

The Auschwitz concentration camp remains as it stands today, as a monument of shame to the lasting memory of its 300,000 victims.

Source: A post-war German newsreel from January 1948, regarding the Auschwitz trial where a number of defendants, rather as at Nuremberg, had been prosecuted by the Polish Government for crimes against humanity. Sentence was passed a week or two before this newsreel was shown.

The lengthy trial, which ended with the execution of a number of people, included the hearing of evidence, the hearing of witness statements, the taking of depositions, and the forensic examination of the site. At the time of this newsreel, Germany was still under Allied occupation, and each media outlet in Germany had to be licensed by the Allied authorities.