Walter Winchell
Birmingham News/December 21, 1944
PART TWO: Indescribable horrors have been committed by Germans on hundreds of death trains, which carry unfortunate victims of the New Order from various corners of Europe to concentration camps in Western Poland and Germany. Jews deported from Czechoslovakia and Austria ride in unheated cattle cars traveling as much as three weeks. Hundreds die from disease and extreme cold en route. In one case, when a baby was born during the journey, a Nazi guard flung it brutally from the train because “there was no room for it.” The mother was driven insane with grief.
PRISONERS ON “DEATH TRAINS” seldom know their destination. Sometimes they go direct to concentration camps after long hours of standing on railroad sidings, as did the train which carried Samuel Rajman from Warsaw to the Treblinka camp in Poland. Even on Rajman’s short journey five women and two men died. When the train stopped at other times prisoners were deliberately destroyed–the old and infirm packed into large, closed trucks which had exhaust pipes arranged to direct fumes into the truck and asphyxiate the inmates. Other prospective victims meanwhile watched and awaited their turn, like animals in a slaughterhouse. Jews shipped from Frankfurt in special trains were thrown off at various locations, forced to undress, then machine-gunned. Their clothes later used to replenish waning stock in Germany.
IN WHOLESALE DEPORTATIONS from Salonika, Greece, lasting six weeks, men, women and children were packed into cattle cars. One witness who traveled over the deportation route afterwards counted bodies of 18 dead children less than 2 years old, who had suffocated and been thrown out en route.
WOMEN SUFFER THE WORST FATE under the Nazi New Order–brutal torture, murder, rape. Forty girls between 14 and 20 years of age in Wroclaw, Poland, were shot down by their guards as they filed out of jail, when guards opened a door and said they were to be released. Female students were rounded up in Czechoslovakia after Germans obtained names and addresses from university offices in Prague.
Nazi officers, carrying lists of students’ names, raided students hostels and even dragged girls from their homes. Each girl taken was handed over to a group of 10 officers. If she fainted under abuse, she was restored to consciousness and further abused by dousing with water. Nazis make routine round-ups of attractive young Polish girls for shipment to Berlin and battlefront brothels, often on pretext of sending them to Germany for forced labor. Many need medical care after a month with the troops.
REGULAR WOMAN HUNTS are organized by Germans in Warsaw, who carry off their prey in trucks. Eighty girls were kidnaped on March 10, 1940, in one Warsaw suburb. With such acts receiving official German sanction, many Nazi military patrol roam at night, catching girls for their own unofficial pleasure. Official records show that the 228th Infantry kidnaped three girls in Powisle in the Spring of 1940, taking them to quarters occupied by troops, where each of them was violated several times The German Seventh Anti-Aircraft Artillery committed similar offenses twice in the district of Mokotow. Of illegitimate children born to occupying German soldiers and women of occupied countries, boys are taken to Germany and girls left behind—thus depriving the country of male children and furnishing cannon fodder for Germany’s next war.
THE “DEATH MARCH” used by Japs on Bataan is not new to Germans. In 1940 French prisoners taken in Brittany were marched for three weeks to Stuttgart. Once en route they were locked in a railroad station for three days without food or drink. Often guards beat them. At their destination they were fed in pig troughs. In formerly occupied Russia the Germans once forced survivors of a typhus epidemic to walk hundreds of kilometers to another camp. Stragglers were drowned en route.
MORE BRUTAL TORTURE METHODS: A German prison ramp In Riga signified slow and certain death to all who were sent there. Torture methods included tying the victim in a painful cradle, with one guard beating him unmercifully while another sat on his head. At one camp in Holland prisoners were buried with only their heads above ground and guards marched around stamping the ground firmly until the buried persons lost consciousness.
EYEWITNESSES tell of brutal “gymnastics” at Oswiecim Camp in Poland, where over 90000 persons perished up to July, 1942. Arriving on crowded cattle trains without sleep and with little food for days, prisoners were forced to run for hours around a gravel yard. After five minutes bare feet began to bleed, prisoners were forced to run for hours around a gravel yard. After five minutes bare feet began to bleed. Other prisoners who lagged were beaten by guards. Men who collapsed were dragged to a pump and revived and then forced to continue running or suffer new tortures. Following this exercise, the prisoners were forced to spin around until overcome by dizziness. Another treatment calls for prisoners to squat and remain motionless. Torn skin of bruised feet cannot support the body’s weight, and prisoners collapse while Nazi guards roar with laughter. No medical attention for cut feet. No bandages. The next day more “gymnastics” on the gravel deepen the cuts, which are never allowed to heal. Soon the blood on the stones is diluted by pus which oozes from prisoners’ feet as long as they live at Oswiecim.
A HUNDRED MEN witnessed this incident and can swear that it happened. An SS man named Schubert punished a Viennese prisoner publicly by forcing him to climb a 130-foot-high mountain pine. When he climbed too slowly, the SS man forced him on with revolver shots. When the prisoner reached the treetop the Nazi sadist forced him to sing, firing at him whenever he stopped. While the prisoner sang idiotic Nazi songs, two overseers were ordered to saw down the tree. When the frightened Viennese howled with fear more bullets flew near him to force him to resume his song. When the tree crashed, he was killed instantly.
OF THE MANY CREMATORIUMS used by the Nazis to exterminate subject peoples, one about which little has been published is at Mauthausen. One ghoulish incident occurred here when bodies were being carted into the furnaces. One victim, who had only fainted, sat up and cried out. The lad servicing the furnace wanted to halt the cart and either kill or save the living man. The SS official in charge shouted that the man must be dead because his death had been recorded in the office. Therefore there could be no restoration. The living man was flung into the furnace.
The Archive 