Apr. 6, 1964 - Enraged German spectators surged toward the prisoners’ dock in Frankfurt today, threatening to lynch a former Gestapo guard accused of driving Jewish children to their death in the Auschwitz gas chambers.
“Kill him! Stamp out the pig! Kill the beast! Hang him!” they screamed at Oswald Kaduk (pictured), 57, one of 22 defendants charged with taking part in the murders of up to 4 million persons in the Nazi death camp in Poland.
Kaduk, his face red with anger, waved his fists and shouted: “You damned liar! You lie, you lie!” at the witness who accused him of killing Jewish boys who had begged for their lives. Police guards stood between Kaduk, a burly onetime butcher and hospital orderly, and the menacing crowd.
Witness Ludwig Woerl whirled and pointed a trembling finger at Kaduk. “You did it! I saw you. You can’t deny it,” Woerl screamed.
Chief Judge Hans Hofmeyer barked “shut up” at Kaduk while he tried to gavel the courtroom to order. But the spectators, mostly young Germans and housewives, continued to shout.
The trial in Frankfurt is one of a series under way in West Germany involving war crimes.
Woerl, now a grocer in Munich, spent 11 years in Nazi concentration camps for opposing Hitler. The courtroom was quiet until he testified that a dozen Jewish children, between the ages of 3 and 11, were shipped to Auschwitz. Woerl was a trusty in charge of inmates who could work. Workers were spared temporarily from the gas chambers.
“They knew they were to be gassed,” he testified. “A few of them — aged 4 or 5 — came up to me and showed me their arms. ‘Look, we’re strong, we can work. Please don’t let us go to the gas chambers,’” he quoted the boys as saying. Woerl said he was “stunned — I had to do something.”
“But there was Kaduk,” Woerl continued, his voice rising to a scream. “That murderer Kaduk with his pistol — he drove them away to the gas chamber!”
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