The story of the mass-murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Oswiecim death camp, in Poland, which many Germans have been inclined to dismiss as Allied propaganda, was told to them today for the first time by a German observer who recently visited the camp.
Broadcasting over the Soviet-controlled berlin radio, as part of a series entitled “The Inferno of the Concentration Camps,” a Paster Loechel of Laucha, in Saxony, said that the horrors of Oswiecim, where the S.S. and the Gestapo destroyed more than 1,000,000 innocent people, far surpass the persecution of early Christians, the tortures of the middle ages, and even Dachau and Maidanek.
Declaring that the Oswiecim horrors will be remembered for generations, Pastor Loechel told his listeners of the almost indescribable condition of the 4,000 survivors found there. He gave statistics on those who were gassed and cremated stressing that most of them were Jews. “I came away humiliated and indignant,” the minister said. “Although the main calprits were the Gestapo and the S.S., the German people are also guilty for tolerating them. We must wipe out this disgrace, which affects all of us.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
