The Pittsburgh Press (August 30, 1944)
‘Woman burned alive’ –
1.5 million persons gassed or cremated by Germans
Visit to torture chamber reveals death house, piles of clothing taken off victims
By Arthur Inkpin, United Press staff writer
Lublin, Poland – (Aug. 27, delayed)
More than one and a half million men, women and children were killed in special gas chambers or cremated at the German Majdanek concentration camp, a Polish and Russian committee investigating the camp said today.
I saw chambers in the camp, established in 1941 ostensibly for ill prisoners of war, where the committee said bodies of prisoners were piled on a metal stretcher doused with inflammable liquid and pushed into a furnace.
Gas chambers found
In another part of the camp, I saw gas chambers with fitted metal doors, peepholes and pipes through which the investigating committeemen said poison gas was introduced into the chambers. Some chambers were obviously intended for carbon monoxide and others showed evidence of both carbon monoxide and prussic acid.
Outside, there were burial pits for the bodies of victims and piles of ashes filled with tiny bits of bones were scattered throughout the camp.
Records at the camp showed that in November 1942, mostly Russians, Poles and Jews were confined in the camp, but representatives of 22 nations were believed killed there. During this period, as many as 70,000 prisoners were confined at the camp, built to hold 50,000.
In October 1941, records showed 5,000 Russian and Polish prisoners were held, but by February 1942, only 45 remained alive.
Woman burned alive
A Lublin pharmacist, Tadeusz Budzin, a camp prisoner who worked in the pharmacy, said the Germans often killed the sick prisoners by injections of a narcotic, Epivan, which if administered slowly is actually beneficial, but if injected in a large dose kills within one minute.
Budzin said:
I watched one doctor kill 15 patients this way and during the time I was at the camp, I had to distribute 6,000 ampules of the drug.
One prisoner at the camp, Hans Stalp, said he was sent to the crematorium on an errand and arrived in time to see a woman burned alive.
He said:
She had been ordered to undress before being shot, and when she refused, her hands and feet were bound. She was placed on a stretcher and shoved into the furnace. I heard one scream and saw her hair catch on fire – the door closed.
In the crematorium, he said there were piles of stretchers scattered around the furnaces. Jagged pieces of bones littered the floor – apparently cut off when they stuck out the furnace doors.
Nearby was a pit containing 47 bodies, believed to be those of prisoners employed in the crematorium and killed by the Germans before they retreated.
Victims’ clothes sorted
Outside of the buildings, I looked around the camp. It seemed to be an ordinary prisoner camp, surrounded by double barbed-wire fences, patrolled once by dogs and German guards. The only thing different about it was the big chimney rising from the middle of the camp.
Then I saw the warehouses, unfinished barracks, filled to the rafters with carefully sorted articles of clothing – suits, dresses, shoes of little girls and women, gloves, trinkets, face cream, nail files, cigarette lighters and fountain pens.
An inventory dated March 21, 1943, was a detailed list of nearly 500,000 items carefully noted by the storehouse manager.
There were many requests from various German organizations asking for goods from the warehouse, with neat notations on the written requests saying, “Request complied with.”
Polish authorities have encased the square crematorium chimney with scaffolding. I was told they are placing a cross on it in memory of those who perished.