Nuremberg (Feb. 28)
Citing action by several states in the United States curbing the activities of the Ku Klux Klan as an organization, chief U.S. Prosecutor Robert H. Jackson, today demanded before the International Military Tribunal here the conviction of six Nazi groups with a total membership exceeding 2,000,000.
Acquittal of these organizations, Jackson said, would be more catastrophic than if the 20 top Nazis on trial here were to be freed. The groups in question are the Nazi Leadership Corps, the Gestapo, the S.S., the S.A., the Reich Cabinet and the German High Command and General Staff.
As the prosecution ended its case yesterday, the court heard Samuel Reizman, a survivor of the Treblinka death camp, and Abraham Sutzkever, who fled the Vilna ghetto, give eye-witness accounts of the extermination of Jews in Poland and Lithuania. The two Jewish witnesses were called by the Soviet prosecution.
Reizman, who was one of the leaders of a revolt in Treblinka in August, 1942, during which many Nazis were killed and part of the camp destroyed, said that Treblinka had thirteen gas chambers in which Jews were executed. Most persons sent there, he said, were murdered within ten minutes of their arrival. He revealed that Kurt Franz, assistant commander of the camp, was promoted following the execution of the 1,000,000th Jew.
In order to prevent the transports of Jews from discovering, as soon as they arrived there, that Treblinka was a death camp, Reizman disclosed, the Germans erected a regular railroad station, although the camp had no rail connections aside from the spur leading to it. Signs were posted on the station indicating that it was on the route to Vienna and other points.
Sutzkever told how tens of thousands of Jews were murdered shortly after the Nazis entered Vilna, and described the horrors of ghetto life in that city. He reported that the Nazis apparently took special delight in killing Jewish infants, and thousands of them, including his own two-day-old son, were murdered.