The Painful Purgative

Hearing the testimony, one judge had a heart seizure. Women jurors, spectators and journalists burst into tears. Day after day the mountain of grisly evidence grew higher as survivors of Hitler's death factory at Auschwitz confronted 22 of their tormentors on trial in Frankfurt's Town Hall.

Some guards could not sleep well at night unless they had beaten someone to death during the day, recalled Dr. Otto Wolken, 60, an Austrian physician at Auschwitz. Calmly pointing out one defendant, Stephan Baretzki, Wolken explained how the guard organized "rabbit hunts." A prisoner would kneel down before Baretzki. At the order "Go, go," the inmate would scamper away on all fours. Then he was shot in the back. While the police dogs at Auschwitz slept in warm, clean kennels with concrete floors, humans were housed in filthy, crowded barracks where they lapped the muddy floor for a few drops of spilled soup.

Squirming Bundles. Describing his pitifully equipped infirmary, Wolken told how he had tied an aspirin with a ribbon and a sign that said: "Prisoners with temperatures of less than 100DEG lick once, those with temperatures higher than 100DEG lick twice." Another prisoner-physician, Dr. Ella Lingens, saw squirming infants, which she at first thought were bundles of old clothing, thrown alive into the fires of the crematorium after the gassed bodies of their mothers. Another ex-inmate testified tearfully that this method of killing babies was ordered by the Nazis because there was a severe shortage of gas for the adult death chambers.

The Frankfurt trial was part of a massive, painful effort by West Germans to purge the nation of its Nazi past by finally facing the facts of how and why 4,000,000 Jews, Poles, Russians and gypsies perished at Auschwitz. Other grim facts from Hitler's hideous era were emerging at the euthanasia trial in Limburg, where Hans Hefelmann, 58, an agronomist, was in the dock, charged with complicity in the Nazis' monstrous euthanasia scheme.

Hefelmann was nabbed early this year along with three other former executives in the project called Operation

Mercy Killing. Two of the defendants committed suicide (TIME, Feb. 21); another, Dr. Gerhard Bohne, fled to Argentina, where last week he was fighting extradition; and so Hefelmann alone was left to tell the court the reasons for exterminating hordes of Germans who were even slightly mentally or physically defective.

Even the Senile. Hefelmann testified that his euthanasia group, dubbed the "Reich Working Committee for Cure and Care Institutions," was headquartered at No. 4 Tiergartenstrasse in Berlin, a title that for secrecy's sake was shortened to "T-4." There was housed the massive bureaucracy that set up carbon monoxide chambers at an in sane asylum and other isolated institutions around Germany--all dedicated to the task of eliminating the weak from Hitler's society. Questionnaires went out to every mental hospital in the nation; doctors were required to designate for T-4 all schizophrenics, mongoloid idiots, microcephalies, hydrocephalics, epileptics, and even patients suffering from simple senility. All physicians were required to advise T-4 of the births of retarded children; midwives were paid two marks (500) for each handicapped baby they turned in to Hefelmann's office. Each serious case was earmarked for the gas chamber; later, a few ounces of ashes were sent to the next of kin, with a note from Hefelmann giving a fabricated cause of death. German churchmen cried out so vigorously from the pulpit that the program eventually was halted. But the protests were too late to save 200,000 victims from their tragic fate.

T-4's executors have never been able to understand why they were put on trial. Explained Hefelmann, who personally was accused of helping to gas 70,000 adults and 3,000 children: "I saw everything from a purely ethical standpoint. An honest affirmation of mercy killings should be seen as a sentiment of Christian sympathy."

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