 |
it then be possible that the SS had the tendency to push the
responsibility towards the shoulders of Farben, if they spoke —
MR. SPECHER: Just a minute. The nature of these last few questions has
been exceedingly improper and we ask that the Court let this witness, who is a
very intelligent witness, testify on his own, having been indicated the subject
by counsel.
PRESIDING JUDGE SHAKE: Sustained. The questions are
leading, Dr. Dix.
DR. DIX: You confirmed for me that the physicians had
the tendency of blaming somebody else for the responsibility.
A. I can
say something else in supplementation. It is an irrefutable fact that only the
SS, the Reich Security Main Office, and particularly, the concentration camp
leadership had to do with these things, and if I said that the SS physicians
endeavored to push the blame on somebody else, then they meant the Reich
Security Main Office.
PRESIDING JUDGE SHAKE: Anything further from this
witness? You may cross-examine the witness. |
| |
| CROSS-EXAMINATION |
| |
| * * * * * * * * * * |
| |
MR. MINSKOFF: Now, Mr. Witness, you testified that persons in
Germany didn't know about the gassings and the exterminations at Auschwitz.
Now, could you tell the Court, how about the civilians that lived in Auschwitz
and smelled these chimneys each day and saw the trains come into Auschwitz? How
about those civilians? Did they know about the gassings that were going on at
Birkenau?
A. I must put it this way. Auschwitz, and the vicinity as far
as Kattowitz [Katowice] was full of rumors about the extermination of Jews by
gassings and by burnings, and if anyone wanted to obtain detailed information
about this then he could do it only by getting in touch with an SS leader with
whom he was closely associated — if he knew him well, and by discussing it
with such an SS leader. A simple SS man would have given him no information,
just as little as any inmate would have given him any information.
Q.
Now, Mr. Witness, I hadn't intended to ask you whether persons in Kattowitz,
about fifty kilometers away, knew about the gassings. I was asking about
Auschwitz itself, the city of Auschwitz, where civilians lived, and in that
city where civilians lived, right in the shadow of the crematoria, did those
civilians, not in Kattowitz but in Auschwitz, did they know about the gassings?
A. Yes, that is the way I also meant it, because in Kattowitz one was
able to smell the stench of the crematoria just as well as in Auschwitz.
Auschwitz and the further surroundings are to be considered equally in this
respect because one could not perceive more than the odor. That's all one could
perceive from these gassings. |
318 |
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