More than 1,715,000 Jews have been put to death in only two German “extermination camps” within the last two years, it has been established by two non-Jewish relief organizations in Switzerland, the Geneva correspondent of the New York Times reports.
The correspondent states that the International Church Movement Ecumenical Refugee Commission with headquarters in Geneva and the Refugee Relief committee of Zurich headed by Rev. Paul Vought, have made public figures showing that in the Nazi “extermination camps” in Auschwitz and in Birkenau, both in Upper Silesia, the following number of Jews have been killed between April 1942 and April 1944.
Poland – 900,000, Yugoslavia, Italy and Norway – 50,000, Netherlands – 100,000, Bohemia, Moravia and Austria – 30,000, Greece – 45,000, Slovakia – 30,000, France – 150,000, Foreign Jews from various camps in Belgium – 50,000, Poland – 300,000, Germany – 60,000.
Pointing out that “hundreds of thousands of Jews” were slain in other camps, the report says that to this total must now be added Hungary’s Jews, tens of thousands of whom, it emphasizes, “have been slain or have died en route to Upper Silesia.”
DEPORTATION OF HUNGARIAN JEWS DESCRIBED BY CHURCH COMMISSION
Discussing “malicious, fiendish, inhuman brutality” in the treatment of Hungarian Jews, the Ecumenical Commission says: “According to authenticated information now at hand, some 400,000 Hungarian Jews have been deported from their homeland since April 6 of this year under inhuman conditions to Upper Silesia. Those who did not die en route were delivered to the camps of Auschwitz and Brikenau in Upper Silesia, where during the past two years, it has now been learned many hundreds of thousands of their co-religionists have been fiendishly done to death.”
After a fortnight to three months’ imprisonment, during whish they were “selected” or worked to death, the Jews were led to the execution halls. These halls consist of fake bathing establishments handling 2,000 to 8,000 daily. Prisoners were led into cells and ordered to strip for bathing. Then cyanide gas was said to have been released, causing death in three to five minutes.
The bodies are burned in crematoriums that hold eight to ten at a time. At Birkenau there are about fifty such furnaces. They were opened March 12, 1943, by a large party of Nazi chiefs who witnessed the “disposal of 8,000 Jews from 9 o’clock in the morning until 7:30 that night,” according to the report.
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