Foreign News: Inferno on Trial

The glare of floodlights suddenly fell on the defendants’ faces. A small, stocky woman walked toward the dock. She pointed at a thin-lipped, narrow-eyed man with a low. receding forehead and brows grown together in a constant frown. “This man I recognize,” she said. (It was Joseph Kramer, commandant of Belsen concentration camp.) The woman walked on. “This man I recognize.” (It was Fritz Klein, Belsen’s doctor.) She moved on down the line of defendants, picking out a dozen others.

Then she stopped before a fierce-eyed, coldly pretty blonde. “This woman I recognize.” (It was Irma Grese, Kramer’s assistant.) The two women stared at each other a moment, then Fraulein Grese lowered her defiant eyes.

The accuser was a Polish woman doctor, Ada Bimko, whose mother, father, sister, brother and son had died in the gas chambers of Oswiecim. The accused were 45 men & women who had worked at Belsen and Oswiecim concentration camps, now being tried under a warrant from His Britannic Majesty by a British military court. From a plain wooden witness box in the center of the converted gymnasium which served as courtroom, day after day, witness after witness added to the compendium of horror.

Wig & Robe. The citizens of the little town of Lüneburg, where the trial was being held, crowded into the grey courtroom. They were seldom moved by what they heard. But they gaped at the drab, precise, and—to them—ridiculously fair ways of foreign justice.

The enormity of the case, the nauseating precision of its bestial details, were almost too much for the mechanism of British legal procedure. But the mechanism worked. The five British officers on the bench, and the learned judge advocate in grey wig and black robe, were dry-voiced and calm. Chief Prosecutor Colonel T. M. Backhouse worked his way through a maze of atrocities with a minimum of emotion (on the trial’s tenth day, he went straight from the courtroom to officiate at a wedding).

A dozen British officers, all experienced lawyers, did their best to defend the accused. Their argument: conditions at the camps had been caused by circumstances beyond the guards’ control. As the trial wore on, death and torture began to sound commonplace, the vocabulary of horror grew too trite for the inferno that was on trial. Said one witness: “It might have been something Dante could have described. I could not.”

“The Foulest & Vilest.” First witness was Brigadier Hugh Llewellyn Glyn Hughes, of the British medical corps (“I have never seen anything that would touch [Belsen]. . . . There were piles of corpses lying all over the camp. . . . The huts were full to overflowing with prisoners in every state of emaciation and disease. There was every known variety of disease in that camp Dead lay where they fell . . .”). His testimony would have been enough to hang most of the 45 defendants (who are charged with an average 1,000 murders each). But there were other witnesses.

¶ Harold Le Druillenec, British: “When the British tanks came, I was having my first meal in five days. I was eating grass. . . . I think I can fairly describe Belsen as the foulest and vilest spot that ever soiled the surface of the earth.”

¶ Sophia Litwinska, Polish: “The victims . . . were hauled to the crematorium where they were dumped out like potatoes. Inside the chamber there were cries, tears —people were shaking and striking each other. Then I noticed yellow fumes entering the room. . . . My name was called. I raised my arm, for my voice could not answer. . . . Then someone pulled me out of the chamber, I don’t know who.”

¶ Dr. Fritz Leo, German: “I have seen bodies with the livers removed for food. I have seen many bodies with the ears cut off, parts of cheeks, shoulders, arms, back and even parts of sexual organs cut off for food, either eaten raw or cooked later.”

The Women. The defendants sat in their long dock, three rows deep, large identification numbers on their chests, listening impassively. The 26 men were grave and sodden. The 19 women kept an insolent composure. There was prune-faced Juana Borman (whose wolfhound liked to tear prisoners to pieces). There was wispy-haired Anna Hampel (who, according to one witness, had a crush on a French internee. “She tried to flirt with him, but he was reluctant, so she beat him all the time”).

And there was 21-year-old Irma Grese (who had worked in concentration camps since she was 17, and liked it). In the dock, she sat rigidly between Herta Ehlert and Use Lothe (see cut). When the prosecution showed a motion picture of a German guard slowly pushing a huge pile of rotting corpses into a pit with a bulldozer, Irma Grese calmly fixed her hair and blew her nose.