Stuttgart News

Stadt-Nachrichten

Friday, December 16, 1966

Page 21

Jews and SS together in retreat

Day 21 of the Lemberg Trial: A historically interesting witness – Simon Wiesenthal

On the 21st day of the Lemberg trial, a man of equal human and historical interest entered the Stuttgart jury courtroom: the 56-year-old Simon Wiesenthal, who today is also known to the public for his Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna and for his decisive involvement in the hunt for Eichmann.

Anyone who read his factual account, "I Hunted Eichmann", was not surprised on Thursday by the man's eloquence and vivid account of his life's journey. Wiesenthal described the fate of his hometown Buczacz, where he was born on December 31, 1908, thus: "Formerly Austria, later Poland, now the Soviet Union. It was such a weather angle. I was liberated eight times in my life!"

Simon Wiesenthal is the first witness in the Galicia trial who survived the end of SS rule not in Galicia in some bunker, hidden in a stable or in the sewers, but was liberated by the Americans in a concentration camp. The Americans took the man, who weighed only 44 kilograms, out of the "death block" in Mauthausen on May 5, 1945. Wiesenthal was one of the few survivors who were taken by the SS on their retreat from the East and brought to Groß-Rosen, the gathering place for the prisoners still alive at the time. Of the 6000 prisoners who were marched from Groß-Rosen, only 1200 arrived at Mauthausen. Of those, 800 still died of weakness or fell victim to the last bullets from SS pistols.

The witness described the march to the West thus: The Russians were twelve kilometers from Lemberg. The remaining prisoners of the Janowska lager were told that they were to be shot the next morning at about 7 o'clock. Then the camp commander at the time, Warzock, came to them: "The SS and police leader has given you your lives. You will leave Lemberg with us." The prisoners were even allowed to take what they wanted from the camp magazine. "It was shocking that people were fetching things they neither needed nor could use," Simon Wiesenthal recalled. About a hundred people were loaded into a railroad car. "Suddenly, the sliding door opened once again and Mr. Blum brought a canary in a cage and a small dog with the words, 'if anything happens to them, I'll kill you.' Isn't that right, Mr. Blum?" Defendant Blum confirmed it.

"The heroic theft is here"

Horrible pictures presented themselves to Wiesenthal during the retreat of the SS. When they had caught up with a troop of fleeing Volksdeutscher, these people were still being robbed of their cars. On the completely congested roads, Warzock forced a major of the Wehrmacht at gunpoint to give way to him. "It was a bridge. We were hardly across when it was blown up behind us. The Wehrmacht columns stayed over and became prisoners." In a Auffanglager set up by the higher SS and Polizeiführer, Wiesenthal saw Katzmann's adjutant, the defendant Inquart, again. "There we understood why we were not shot. The gentlemen of the SS did not want to go to the front." Warzock's words now sounded completely different to the Jews than earlier in the Janowska camp: "Children, don't flee – you will experience the end of the war with us." The words of another SS man: "The heroic theft" is here, Wiesenthal had understood only later. "It was General Unruh who was still looking for fighters!" The witness believes that it was thanks to a coincidence that "the last 34 Jews from Lemberg" did not reach Auschwitz: because the corresponding wagon was accidentally not uncoupled. Thus, the journey continued to Groß-Rosen near Breslau.

German lifesavers, too

The man who, as a six-year-old boy, saw his father go to war for Austria – he fell for Austria in 1918 – has experienced every kind of German concentration camp. "I was sent to the Janowskalager alone four times!" When the war broke out, he was working in Lviv as an architect. Fourteen days after the Germans invaded, he escaped the hunt for the Jewish intelligentsia: a Ukrainian militiaman he knew from construction sites saved his life. But Germans also saved Mr. Wiesenthal's life. He thinks fondly of the management of the Ostbahnwerke, which set up special "night shifts" for the Jewish labor prisoners when particularly bad actions were about to take place in the Lviv ghetto. Wiesenthal's mother – made a widow for the second time by the Soviets' hatred of capitalists a few years earlier – fell victim to the so-called August Action in 1942. "When I returned to the ghetto on August 15, 1942, my mother was no longer there. She walked the sad way to Belzec with many others!"

An almost grotesque contrast to the witness Wiesenthal on the 21st day of questioning must have been a scene that had taken place in the morning. The defendant Blum, once the "manager" of the laundry, the clothing store and the tailor shop in the Janowska camp and thus the master of life and death of such men as Simon Wiesenthal, addressed the witness Porath , the 58-year-old graduate engineer from Tel Aviv: "Mr. Porath, despite your untrue statement, I feel the need to say something to you. I regret that I was so young and immature at that time that I could not see that this was wrong. When I became aware of how meanly we ethnic Germans were misused for such a thing, I lost my faith in humanity. Mr. Porath, I wanted to say that, and please, say that to all your people!"

“Punished" with the whip

In this context, it should be recalled that the stoker Peter Blum from Schweinfurt, now 45 years old, had shouted with the same pathos during his interrogation: "One should hold the big people responsible and not the little monkeys." Blum had affirmed that he was completely innocent of all 23 charges. The treatment of Jewish prisoners in the Janowska camp had not struck him as "anything special" either, and he had "of course" used his six-foot whip to "punish" prisoners whenever he thought it was necessary. The trial will be continued next Tuesday. Simon Wiesenthal will then comment on a general situation of Jews in Lviv, on the Janowska camp and on various experiences with defendants. a–z