WEST GERMANY: Return of the Pig

Watching on television the first 600 German prisoners returning from the Soviet Union, Hendrik van Dam, Secretary-General of the Jewish Council in Germany, saw a lined, familiar face show up on the screen. A few minutes later his phone rang, and an excited voice shouted: “Did you see the pig?”

The face Van Dam and many others had cause to remember belonged to Nazi Gynecologist Carl Clauberg, an SS general and onetime chief of the infamous Block Ten medical section at Auschwitz concentration camp, where he carried out brutal sterilization experiments on Jewish women, killing many of them.

Carefully sifting the evidence he had against Clauberg, Van Dam decided that murder might be hard to prove, and he wanted to be sure. Van Dam, a lawyer, finally addressed a letter to the public prosecutor at Kiel, charging only that Clauberg had “caused severe bodily harm” to Jewish women at Auschwitz, backed his charge with sworn statements from more than 30 sterilized women who had survived Clauberg’s experiments. He also cited a letter in which Clauberg boasted to Gestapo Chief Himmler that “my method of achieving sterilization of the female organs has been developed more or less completely … it is accomplished by a single injection … If the examinations which I have been carrying on continue to work out, the moment is not far away when I could probably sterilize several hundred, perhaps even 1,000 Jewesses per day.” Last week Kiel police arrested Clauberg, the first Russian returnee to be taken into custody. Said Hendrik van Dam: “It does not matter whether this pathetic creature goes to jail for 15 years or one year or one day. It is history that matters. Many people, dismissing Nürnberg as a ‘victor’s vengeance’ are skeptical of Nürnberg evidence. We mean to show that this man is guilty not under the victor’s law but under German law.”