The Military Court sitting here in judgment on Joseph Kramer and forty-four members of his staff at Belsen has had a surfeit of horror during the past fortnight, but for sheer ghastliness nothing has equalled the description given in evidence to-day of the gas chambers of Auschwitz, which were used as the chief instrument of Nazi policy for mass extermination of the Jews.
The prosecution put forward an unexpected witness in Charles Bendel, a Rumanian doctor resident in Paris for many years, who was arrested there in 1943 for not wearing the yellow star and was sent to Auschwitz. Here he worked at a crematorium as doctor to the special Kommando of prisoners required to dispose of bodies from the gas chamber and who were kept under lock and key lest details of what went on became known in the rest of the camp.
80,000 WIPED OUT
Dr. Bendel╒s was the whitest face in the courtroom as, speaking in French in almost a whisper, he described a normal day at the cremating places during a period when 80,000, composing the whole ghetto of Lodz, were being wiped out. Even some of the accused, let alone the many British officers and German civilians in court, seemed appalled at the horror of it all, and later on, with the brilliant arc lights over the dock switched on, Dr. Bendel came forward and with a disdainful wave of the hand identified Kramer and the S.S. doctor Klein as being in positions of responsibility at Auschwitz at the time.
At Berkenau, a sector of the main camp, there were, stated the witness, four crematoriums, each equipped with two gas chambers. But their capacity became insufficient and an additional system was devised by digging large trenches, some 12 yards by six, in which the bodies were burned, and to expedite matters channels were cut at the bottom of the trenches to drain away the human fat.
It was part of his Kommando╒s work to prepare these pits each day by laying huge wood fires saturated with petrol, and by this system it was possible to dispose of one thousand bodies an hour as against one thousand a day in a crematorium.
At eleven o╒clock in the morning, witness went on, the chief of the political bureau would arrive on his motor-cycle to say that a new batch of prisoners had arrived. There would be between 800 and 1,000 of them, some on foot and others, usually too ill to walk, in tip-up trucks, from which, to the amusement of the drivers, they were spilled out without warning. They were taken into the courtyard or, in winter, to a large hall of the crematorium and required to undress under the pretext that they were to take a bath followed by hot coffee.
Then came a wait for the gas to arrive, said the witness. Raising his voice, he exclaimed that for a doctor the greatest insult was to have the cylinders delivered in a Red Cross ambulance in which, on occasion, he had seen the prisoner Klein.
BLOWS AT VICTIMS
Then the doors of the two-roofed gas chambers would be opened and the victims, who by this time realised that they were going to their death, herded in with blows from whips and sticks. Finally the guards would succeed in locking the doors. ╥You would hear cries and shouts as the people within began to fight against each other and to beat at the walls. This goes on for two minutes ╤ then complete silence, nothing more.╙
About twenty minutes later, said Dr. Bendel, the main task of the special Kommando began. With the opening of the doors the bodies, tightly jammed inside, would fall out. Often it was almost impossible to separate one from another and one had the impression that they had fought terribly against death. Anyone who had seen a gas chamber filled to a height of four feet with corpses would never forget it. Before they were dragged by their wrists to the ghats, barbers and dentists would shear off the hair and go over the teeth.
╥HELL LET LOOSE╙
As for the Kommando, which might contain an electrical engineer from Budapest or a solicitor from Salonika, people who had human faces a few minutes before were no longer recognisable. It was hell let loose. ╥They are like devils, no longer human beings as they drag the corpses away as fast as possible under a rain of blows from the S.S.╙
At the same time guards by the edge of the pits would go on shooting people for whom there had not been room in the gas chambers. After one and a half hours of it the work would be completed ╤ a new convoy had been dealt with in crematorium No. 4.
╥Who was commandant at Auschwitz at the time?╙ asked Colonel Backhouse, prosecuting officer. ╥Kramer,╙ came the swift response.
It became apparent in cross-examination that a plot had been prepared by the Kommandos to destroy a crematorium. Women prisoners working in a munitions factory had attempted to pass on dynamite to them. In October 500 men revolted and tried to set fire to crematorium No. 3. Firearms were hidden in No. 1 crematorium, but through a misunderstanding were not used.
There was a touch of the macabre at the conclusion of to-day╒s hearing when Anita Lasker, a pretty German girl of nineteen, spoke of how she had played the ╒cello in the camp orchestra at Auschwitz and from her quarters near the crematorium had watched bodies brought to the burning-pits.
