MURDER FACTORY TAKEN BY YANKS
20 000 Persons Believed Systematically Slain by Nazis
Limburg, Germany, Apr. 10 (AP)
American troops have discovered a German "murder factory," rivalling any house of horror dreamed up by fiction writers, where it is estimated 20,000 persons viewed by the Nazis as "undesirables," were systematically slain.
Located in an insane asylum near Limburg, the terror-filled establishment was in charge of a tall, scar-faced 70 year old Nazi surgeon, assisted by a 45 year old chief woman's nurse and middle-aged chief warden, allied officers said. On the staff were SS (elite guard) officers from Berlin.
Tales told by German residents of the village of Hadamar, four miles north of Limburg, led US First army officers Lt. George Walker of Deshler, O., and Capt. Alton H. Jung of San Antonio, Tex. to question officials int he village and resulted in locating the asylum.
May. Harvey M. Coverly, Sausalito, Calif., ordered the arrest of the three in charge of the "factory," said by the officers to be one of six set up by the Nazis inside Germany to dispose scientifically of unruly slave labourers or those who had outlive their usefulness.
German civil authorities estimated 15,000 victims were gassed and cremated and another 5,000 killed by drugs and poison and buried in communal graves.
The stench of burning bodies caused Hadamar residents to complain, and the bishop of Muenster lodged protests with the asylum officials. That caused the Nazis to switch from gas to hypodermic injections and from cremation to mas burial.
The slayings were described as "mercy killings" authorized by a 1939 Nazi statute.
Two investigators, Capt. Brinkley Hamilton, a British officer attached to an American infantry division, and Lt. W.R. Johnson, Loveland, Colo., told a macabre story of death and torture and ghoulish feasts by drunken executioners in the asylum, were 300 crazed inmates were permitted to run free in underground dungeons.
"Nobody would believe it," said Johnson. "It had underground chambers with dripping water, bats flying around and little crazy men who jumped out at you at every step."
Of the Nazi surgeon in charge, Johnson said: "I never saw a tougher looking man in my life."
The job of the chief nurse, he added, "was to put the death needle into women patients. She was about six feet tall, built like a football player and as ugly as a witch."
The head keeper, "a mousey-looking middle-aged man who had been promoted from driving victims to the asylum to the actual job of doing away with them" gave the officers the first indication of how the asylum operated, Johnson declared.
"He told us the asylum never held more than 500 patients and show us that there were only 481 graves in the cemetery. There were fresh empty graves and when we asked him about them he said 'we always keep three graves ahead."
The officers learned that from six to 20 bodies were dumped into each grave.
Captain Hamilton, a veteran of 20 years at London's Bow street police station, said that one one [sic] day 500 Russians were taken into the asylum and not one came out alive.
"When we first walked thru the asylum the insane inmates, laughing and screaming, followed us around in packs." Hamilton added. "There were dwarfs and stupid giants, but all seemed harmless. Only the sane people there were killed."
He said that each morning the surgeon director, the head keeper and the nurse conferred on who would be killed that day.
"One assistant said the doctor was regarded as a kind man because if one of the victims fought against taking the hypo needle the surgeon would not let the attendants beat him into submission," Hamilton recounted. "He just let the man go without food until he was too weak to object."
The gas chambers and crematorium were operated by SS men from Berlin, the investigators added.
After their 10,000th killing the SS men had a drinking orgy." Hamilton said. "They cleaned out the skulls of some of their victims and used them as drinking cups. Townspeople and former employees at the asylum testified to this."
He said some of the victims were "young children who were half Jews."
Most of the victims appeared to be Russian men and women workers who couldn't stand the strain of hard work and little food, the officers said. Many Poles and some Dutch were killed, but there was no evidence to prove that Belgian or French were slain.
The surgeon, confronted by evidence and testimony on operations of the murder factory, was quoted by Captain Hamilton as saying: "I have always been a doctor of honor."
