SS Witnesses to Gas Chambers at Auschwitz - Factual Query

[nickterry]

Reading arguments on http://p102.ezboard.com/frodohforumfrm2 ... D=18.topic , I came across a claim that there were at least 69 SS officers and men who testified after the war to witnessing the gas chambers and their use. But no list.

Quick initial stab at this; i.e. some known witnesses, but also list of the accused in 2 main trials - not all of whom will have been 'gas chamber witnesses'.

Confirmed Gas Chamber Witnesses
Rudolf Höss
Dr Fritz Klein Bergen-Belsen trial
SS guard Peter Weingartner Bergen-Belsen trial*
Franz Hössler Bergen-Belsen trial
Josef Kramer Bergen-Belsen trial
Pery Broad to British
Otto Moll at Nuremberg; Dachau trial
Walter Dejaco Vienna trial
Richard Bär
Hans Stark
SS Private Hoelbinger
SS Private Boeck
Johann Schwarzhuber
SS guard Oskar Groening BBC interview
Dr Karl Kahr (Standortarzt) Nbg Affidavit NO-1948

* dodged question, hearsay

sources:

http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/camps/bergen ... al-04.html

http://shamash.org/holocaust/denial/testimony.txt

some footnotes in Karin Orth, Das System der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager

Krakow Trial 1947/1948
Arthur Liebehenschel (Kdt) Krakow (hanged 24.1.48)
Karl Möckel (Verwaltungsführer) Krakow (hanged 24.1.48)
SS-Stubaf Franz Kraus (Verw.Offz.)Krakow (hanged 24.1.48)
Arthur Breitweiser (WVHA-man) Krakow (death, com to life)
Maximilian Grabner (Chef Pol.Abt.)Krakow (hanged 24.1.48)
SS-Stubaf Hans Aumeier Krakow (hanged 24.1.48)
Erich Muhsfeld (crematory chief) Krakow (hanged 24.1.48)
Dr Hans Münch (doctor) Krakow (acquitted)
SS-Ostuf Dr Johann Kremer Krakow (death; com to life)
Ludwig Herbert (Blockführer) Krakow (hanged 24.1.48)
Richard Schröder (Blockführer) Krakow (10 years)
August Bogusch (Blockführer) Krakow (hanged 24.1.48)
Paul Szczurek (Blockführer) Krakow (hanged 24.1.48)
Paul Götze (Blockführer) Krakow (hanged 24.1.48)
Kurt Müller (Blockführer) Krakow (hanged 24.1.48)
Eduard Lorenz (Blockführer) Krakow (15 years)
Ludwig Plagge (Rapportführer) Krakow (hanged 24.1.48)
Otto Lätsch (Rapportführer) Krakow (hanged 24.1.48)
Fritz Buntrock (Rapportführer) Krakow (hanged 24.1.48)
Heinrich Josten (Kompanieführer) Krakow (hanged 24.1.48)
Hermann Kirschner (guard) Krakow (hanged 24.1.48)
Wilhelm Gehring (guard) Krakow (hanged 24.1.48)
Johannes Weber (guard) Krakow (15 yrs)
Alexander Bülow (guard) Krakow (15 years)
Karl Seufert (guard) Krakow (life)
Detlef Nebbe (guard) Krakow (life)
Anton Lechner (guard) Krakow (life)
Hans Koch (guard) Krakow (life, d. 1955 prison)
Karl Jeschke (guard) Krakow (3 years)
Erich Dinges (SS driver) Krakow (prison)
Hans Schumacher Krakow (hanged 24.1.48)
Josef Kollmer Krakow (hanged 24.1.48)
Adolf Medefind Krakow (life)
Franz Romeikat Krakow (15 years)
Hans Hoffmann Krakow (15 years)
Maria Mandl Krakow (hanged 24.1.48 )
Therese Brandl (Aufseherin) Krakow (hanged 24.1.48)
Luise Danz (Aufseherin) Krakow (life)
Hildegard Lächert (Aufseherin) Krakow (15 years)
Alice Orlowski Krakow (15 years)

source: http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... =auschwitz


Frankfurt Trial 1963-65
Stefan Baretzki (Blockführer) Frankfurt Trial
Wilhelm Boger (Pol.Abt) Frankfurt Trial
Johann Schobert (Pol.Abt) Frankfurt Trial (acquitted)
Willi Stark (Pol.Abt.) Frankfurt Trial
Emil Hantl (Sani) Frankfurt Trial
Viktor Capesius (pharmacist) Frankfurt Trial
Karl Höcker (adjutant) Frankfurt Trial
Franz-J Hoffmann (Schzthlf) Frankfurt Trial
Oswald Kaduk (Rapportf) Frankfurt Trial
Josef Klehr (Sani) Frankfurt Trial
SS-Ostuf Dr Franz Lucas Frankfurt Trial
Robert Mulka (adjutant) Frankfurt Trial
Willi Sawatzki Frankfurt Trial
Willi Schatz (SS dentist) Frankfurt Trial (acquitted)
Herbert Scherpe (SS-Oscha) Frankfurt Trial
Bruno Schlange (SS-Oscha) Frankfurt Trial
Friedrich Schlüter Frankfurt Trial
Karl Uhlenbroock (standortarzt) Frankfurt Trial (acquitted)

source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_Auschwitz_trials
and elsewhere

Contractors
Kurt Prüfer Erfurt, DDR
Fritz Sander Soviet interrog
Karl Schultze Soviet interrog

source: http://fcit.usf.edu/holocaust/resource/ ... cTest1.htm

and http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot. ... ns-of.html

Initial comments

There are clusters of interrogations

a) by the British starting in Norway (Aumeier) and going through to Belsen trial; many handed over to Poland in 1946/1947.
b) at Nuremberg proper (Moll, Hoess)
c) by Polish investigators before Krakow trials
d) by Soviets in 1945 (Topf & Soehne)
e) for Frankfurt Trial of 1963-65 (Mulka et al)
f) for Vienna Trial of 1972 (Dejaco et al)
g) several other trials (Justiz und NS-Verbrechen lists at least 6-10 in BRD and DDR)


So, if anyone has names to add, they'd be very welcome. Especially if you have the Frankfurt trial transcript/DVD, and can identify which of the above accused gave

[Boby]

Did Aumeier mention gas chambers in his handwriting comments in Oslo?

[nickterry]

Did Aumeier mention gas chambers in his handwriting comments in Oslo?

He certainly did in some of his interrogations by the British. You know very well where you can find them! On David Irving's website - just google Hans Aumeier.

But I'm not an expert on this question, that's why I'm asking for more names.

A friend on another forum points out that over 1,000 SS men who served at Auschwitz were extradited to Poland after the war - obviously not all will have been 'gas chamber witnesses', esp. if for example they served as guards at a sub-camp or Monowitz; but it suggests there would be many more testimonies, some perhaps unknown to Western researchers, in Polish legal/historical archives.

Still, there are many others who were interrogated in the West - contributing to Nuremberg, or another Western trial - so perhaps experts on these things might remember some extra names beyond the ones given above.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks to the work of the Polish Military Mission and the Polish government, at least 1,000 former members of the Auschwtiz SS were extradited to Poland in the years 1946-48. On the basis of a decree promulgated on September 12, 1944, special penal courts were appointed. On January 22, 1946, a special act appointed the Supreme National Tribunal, which was charged with trying the most important criminals extradited to Poland. Between March 11 and 29, 1947, in Warsaw, it brought to trial the camp's first commandant, Hoess, and from November 24 to December 16, 1947, in Krakow, it tried 40 members of the Auschwitz SS force.

These two trials met with considerable response in Poland and worldwide, since they revealed the dimensions of the crime perpetrated in Auschwitz. Hoess and 23 defendants in the Krakow trial were sentenced to death (two of them were pardoned later), six received life sentences, seven were sentenced to 15 years in prison, and three received sentences of ten, five, and three years. One SS man was acquited.

Other members of the Auschwitz SS personnel extradited to Poland were tried by district courts in Krakow, Wadowice, Raciborz, Cieszny, Sosnowiec, Gliwice, Bytom, and Katowice. The trial records available to this author indicate that legal action was taken against 602 persons, of whom 590 were sentenced; 11 died awaiting trial, and in one case, proceedings were discontinued. Death sentences were passed against six SS men and the two SS women supervisors (1.4 percent of all district court rulings), three SS men were sentenced to life in prison (0.5 percent of all rulings), six were acquitted (1 percent), and the remaining defendants received sentences ranging from six months to 15 years in prison (97.1 percent).

...The largest proportion of the 631 SS men convicted and sentenced by Polish courts were guards--426 defendants (67.5 percent). The next largest group of defendants--166, or 26.3 percent--included former functionaries of one of the seven departments of the camp administration. The remaining 37 former SS men had worked for SS firms or for central offices of this organization operating in Auschwitz (5.9 percent). In addition, two former camp commandants, Hoess and Arthur Liebehenschel, stood trial in Poland.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp
Postwar Prosecution of the Auschwitz SS
Aleksander Lasik
Indiana University Press
1998
p. 594,595

[robota]

There is a difference between being convicted and providing testimony about gas chambers. The two are not the same.

Some of the testimony provided at the Frankfurt trial was not very good. For example one I remember refered to Krema I as a gas chamber in late 1944 long after we now know it was converted into an air raid shelter. Although it is likely the court nor the witnesses were aware that the Museum was going to make that admission.

Hans Aumeier's testimony, obtained in the London Cage, which has received some publicity recently, clearly confused the bunkers and Kremas II/III into a single gestalt entity.

These unfortunates were taken at once by lorry to the gas-chambers and crematorium which were about 2 miles away from the camp. One arrival They were taken into a hut where they had to undress after which they were driven into the gas-chambers. They were told that they were to be disinfected, and, in fact, the word 'disinfection' was written on the a outside of the gas-chamber. Then the doors were closed and a member of the execution squad poured the gas into the chamber through a small opening at the top or side. The gas was Cyklon B which, PW states, led to death within half to one minute. On the following day the corpses were taken by lift to the actual crematorium and burnt, but not until other prisoners had been forced to remove gold teeth from the bodies, During the second half of PW's service at AUSCHWITZ, thee bodies of females had their hair cut off, but PW states that he does not know the reason for this.

Source Mr Irving's website. Correspondence to Vienna Prisonhouse.

As regards to the polish prosecutions, your friend seems to have omitted the fact that most were for very short sentences, from the same book, next paragraph.

Thus the most common sentence was three years in prison (passed against 32.3 percent of the defendents), mainly on the grounds that the defendent had been a member of the SS.

This 3 years is about the same stretch that POWs were doing labor reparations in France and Britain and Eastern Europe and considerably less than what was being received for being a member of the Wehrmacht in the Soviet Union. So I wonder if many of these were admitting to seeing gas chambers. Or possibly they would if it was a choice between a stretch in a Polish prison or off to Siberia as a simple German POW.

Of course the advantage of receiving these short Polish sentences is that it would make future prosecutions in West Germany very difficult on grounds of double jeopardy.

[nickterry]

There is a difference between being convicted and providing testimony about gas chambers. The two are not the same.

robota, can you not read? I said:

also list of the accused in 2 main trials - not all of whom will have been 'gas chamber witnesses'.

This is why I made this enquiry.

Aumeier's British evidence suggests he was using a common tactic among many interrogees, namely to delay events chronologically as late as possible, in order to exculpate themselves or minimise the overall scale. Dejaco did the same thing at the Vienna 1972 trial.

Also to obfuscate. SS testimony is not Gospel - it is in fact the testimony of criminals by any definition, and has to be treated with caution, since those accused of crimes always have very great motivation to lie.


The Polish prosecutions are of interest not because there will be 1000 witnesses - many guards will have served in a sub-camp and seen essentially nothing, and be able to claim as much convincingly to a judge - but because it suggests that there are in fact more witnesses to gas chambers than may be assumed by some. Since the cases were scattered across various Polish courts, it's perhaps unsurprising that these sources are less known in the West.

[David Thompson]

nickterry -- There's an overview of the 69 known SS witnesses, taken from Nazi Mass Murder and reproduced at: http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 103#480103 which tracks the arguments on http://p102.ezboard.com/frodohforumfrm2 ... D=18.topic

A fair number of the Polish trials of SS men are listed in this thread: SS men extradited to Poland
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=16067

Like you, I'm interested in knowing if there's untranslated testimony out there.

[nickterry]

nickterry -- There's an overview of the 69 known SS witnesses, taken from Nazi Mass Murder and reproduced at: http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 103#480103 which tracks the arguments on http://p102.ezboard.com/frodohforumfrm2 ... D=18.topic

A fair number of the Polish trials of SS men are listed in this thread: SS men extradited to Poland
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=16067

Like you, I'm interested in knowing if there's untranslated testimony out there.

You've given the link, here's the citation from Kogon, edited down for clarity

Rudolf Höss ....

Among the SS men who served at Auschwitz, the secondmost witness is without doubt SS-Unterscharführer Pery Broad,
...

The third competent, independent witness is Dr. Johann Paul Kremer,


To these three principal witnesses, whose accounts date from before the end of the war (in the case of Dr. Kremer's diary) or from soon afterward, may be added several SS members from Auschwitz who testified during the Frankfurt trial and were defended by twenty-two attorneys. Eight former members of the SS (Richard Böck, Gerhard Hess, K. Hölblinger, Dr. Kremer, Dr. Konrad Morgen, Henry Storch, Franz-Johann Hofmann, and Dr. Gerhard Wiebeck) admitted that they had seen the gas chambers at Birkenau in operation. Of these eight, seven were appearing as witnesses and the eighth, Hofmann, as a defendant. Among the other SS men who testified during the trial, not a single one denied the existence of the gas chambers or their purpose; none expressed the least doubt on the subject.

Richard Baer,

Walter Dejaco

We have the testimony of the forty SS men from Auschwitz who were tried in Poland in 1946 and 1947, and that of Höss as well; we have the testimony of nineteen SS men tried in the Federal Republic of Germany from 1963 to 1965; and we have that of Baer and Dejaco and seven other SS men, questioned as witnesses, who admitted having seen the Birkenau gas chambers functioning. This makes a total of sixty-nine witnesses who had been members of the SS.

This leaves the following names as supplementary, some of which will overlap with the 69 given by Kogon, but others not (Kramer and Hoessler were executed; better statements might be available in WCIU files in the PRO).

Dr Fritz Klein Bergen-Belsen trial
SS guard Peter Weingartner Bergen-Belsen trial*
Franz Hössler Bergen-Belsen trial
Josef Kramer Bergen-Belsen trial
Otto Moll at Nuremberg; Dachau trial
Hans Stark
Johann Schwarzhuber
SS guard Oskar Groening BBC interview
Dr Karl Kahr (Standortarzt) Nbg Affidavit NO-1948

Dr Friedrich Entress Nbg NO-2368 - witness

plus civilian contractors:
Kurt Prüfer Erfurt, DDR
Fritz Sander Soviet interrog
Karl Schultze Soviet interrog
(at least)

= many more.

Aumeier was extradited from British to Polish custody, no one has to my knowledge yet compared his statements to either authorities.

David, do you have any of the Nuremberg Documents related to this question, can you post links for those?

[simsalabim]

At last, I found some info and testimonies of SS Doctor Hans Munch, who also testified in Krakow:

from a swedish television interview:
http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/m/mue ... rview.html
and on the IMT:
http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/m/mue ... imony.html

(And yes, mr Munch is also known for his rather racist remarks on Sinti and Roma
http://www.123recht.net/article.asp?a=3589)

[W.L. Shirer]

Germany to open Holocaust archive
By Ray Furlong
BBC News, Berlin

Germany is to open up a huge archive of Nazi records on concentration camp inmates and slave labourers, ending a long-running dispute. Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries announced the move during a US visit. The files contain detailed information about more than 17 million people who went through the concentration camp and slave labour system. Until now, Germany had resisted international pressure to allow access, citing privacy considerations. The files are locked up at a former SS barracks in Bad Arolsen in central Germany. The International Red Cross has used the files to help trace people for relatives who lost contact during the war. It still gets around 150,000 requests a year.

Over several years, there has been growing pressure to open the archive for historical research and for survivors to have direct access. The US and UK have pushed for the files to be opened, as have Jewish groups, but Germany has always resisted, citing privacy considerations. The files contain details ranging from the results of lice inspections to the possession of insurance policies. Germany had feared that it would be the target of legal action if this information became public. These concerns seem now to have been put to rest.

It is not expected that the opening of the archives will have major legal implications because the deadlines set for international class action lawsuits have now passed.The decision to open the archive can now be formally approved in May when representatives of the 11 countries which are responsible for it next meet.

[David Thompson]

For a thread on this subject see "International Tracing Service (Arolsen)" at
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=95921

Comments on this subject should be posted to that earlier thread.