West Germany: The Auschwitz Business

The biggest murder trial in West German history was under way last week in a stark, high-ceilinged auditorium in Frankfurt’s Town Hall. Behind six rows of wooden desks sat the 22 defendants, who looked like an ordinary cross section of West German citizens. Indeed they were: facing the court were dentists and businessmen, a farmer, a salesman, a pharmacist. What set them apart was that they were once custodians of that death factory called Auschwitz, the concentration camp where Hitler’s men killed Jews, gypsies, Poles and Russians at the rate of up to 9,000 a day during World War II.

It has taken five years to assemble all the ugly evidence of Auschwitz, and it will probably take at least six months or more to tell the full tale in court.

Prosecutors sifted 17,000 pages of pre-trial testimony before coming up with a 700-page indictment that describes in detail how prisoners were slain with pistols, poison gas, clubs, bottles, and by trampling, hanging, drowning, freezing, injections and electrocution.

Confronted by the mountain of evidence, the accused pleaded the familiar defense that they were only “little men” who followed orders. One of the major defendants, Robert Mulka, 68, a prosperous Hamburg importer who was assistant commandant of Auschwitz, declared that he “knew nothing, saw nothing, heard nothing” about mass extermination. Why, swore Mulka, he had never even set foot inside the vast prisoners’ compound.

Stuttgart Salesman Wilhelm Boger, 57, onetime chief of the Auschwitz intelligence system, boasted that the place had the lowest escape rate of any Nazi concentration camp. Boger was the inventor of a torture rack known as the “Boger swing,” in which the victim—bound hand and foot and swinging from a beam—was whipped, often until he died. “We helped those too tired to go on,” Boger blandly explained. The most defiant defendant was a burly ex-butcher and male nurse, Oswald Kaduk, 57, who was charged with breaking the necks of elderly prisoners by standing on a walking stick placed against their necks. Kaduk had already served nine years in an East German prison for what he contemptuously called “the Auschwitz business” when he was paroled and fled to West Berlin. There police caught up with him again. “I stand here innocent,” Kaduk shouted at the court. “I chose the West and I bitterly regret it. I never dreamed of such injustice.”