Prosecution witness
quotes
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Holocaust
revisionism
Witnesses for the prosecution were professional witnesses who were paid; they were housed in the barracks of the former Dachau concentration camp so that they could be available as witnesses in many of the other proceedings at Dachau. According to Joseph Halow, a court reporter at several of the Dachau proceedings, who wrote a book entitled "Innocent at Dachau," the professional witnesses in the Spanish Kapo case "caused the prosecutor various embarrassments. He was often forced to remind these witnesses of important details from their pretrial statements, including beatings and killings, which they seemed, bewilderingly enough for uninitiated observers, to have entirely forgotten on the stand. Their testimonies included inconsistencies of a wildness to embarrass all but the most gullible of bigoted hearers." Trial of Spanish Kapos
Halow wrote the following regarding the witnesses at the trial of the Spanish
Kapos:
"Predominantly Eastern European Jews, their stock
testimony, repeated in trial after trial, was that the accused had been known to
beat inmates, that they had witnessed one or more such beatings, and that they
had seen the accused beat the inmates so severely they died."
The men on trial were referred to as the "accused," rather
than the "defendants" because they were considered to be guilty and the burden
of proof was on them, not on the prosecution. The rules of the American justice
system did not apply here.
Prior to the proceedings of the military tribunal, the
accused war criminals were interrogated to obtain confessions. One of the
accused in the Spanish Kapos case, Moises Fernandez, tesitifed on the witness
stand that he had been beaten by his American interrogators in an effort to
force him to confess to killing two men. He named the man who beat him the most
severely as Stanislaus Feldman, who had also served as an interpreter on the
first day of the proceedings. This accusation was not unique; many of the men on
trial at Dachau claimed that they had been beaten by their Jewish interrogators.
Trial of Spanish Kapos
Dr. Sitte, who had a Ph.D. in physics, was one of the
star witnesses against Ilse Koch. He had been a
prisoner at Buchenwald from September 1939 until the liberation. He testified
that tattooed skin was stripped from the bodies of dead prisoners and "was often
used to create lampshades, knife cases, and similar items for the SS." He told
the court that it was "common knowledge" that tattooed prisoners were sent to
the hospital after Ilse Koch had passed by them on work details. Dr. Sitte's
testimony of "common knowledge" was just another word for hearsay testimony,
which was allowed by the American Military Tribunal.
According to Joshua M. Greene, author of "Justice at Dachau,"
Dr. Sitte testified that "These prisoners were killed in the hospital and the
tattooing stripped off."
Under cross-examination, Dr. Sitte was forced to admit that
he had never seen any of the lampshades allegedly made of human skin and that he
had no personal knowledge of any prisoner who had been reported by Frau Koch and
was then killed so that his tattooed skin could be made into a lampshade. He
also admitted that the lampshade that was on the display table in the film was
not the lampshade made from human skin that was allegedly delivered to Frau
Koch. Apparently the most important piece of evidence, the lampshade made from
human skin, was nowhere in sight during the trial.
Ilse Koch - human lampshades
Gustav Petrat was a 19-year-old dog handler in the infamous Mauthausen concentration camp. He was assigned to the camp as a guard with a leashed dog, after being