DUPONT: Shiedlauski carried out the selection and picked out the sick
and invalids. Prior to January 1945 they were sent to Auschwitz; later
on they went to Bergen-Belsen. None of them ever returned.
Another case which I witnessed concerns a Jewish labor squad which was
sent to Auschwitz and stayed there several months. When they came back,
they were unfit for even the lighter work. A similar fate overtook them.
They also were sent to Auschwitz again. I myself personally witnessed
these things. I was present at the selection and I witnessed their
departure.
Later on, the executions in Buchenwald took place in the camp itself. To
my own knowledge they began in September 1944 in room 7, a little room
in the Revier. The men were done away with by means of inter-cardiac
injections. The output was not great; it did not exceed a few score a
day, at the most.
Later on more and more convoys came in, and the number of cachexy cases
increased. The executions had to be speeded up. At first they were
carried out as soon as the transports arrived; but from January 1945
onwards they were taken care of in a special block, Block 61. At that
date all those nicknamed “Mussulmans” on account of their appearance
were collected in this block. We never saw them without their blankets
over their shoulders. They were unfit for even the lightest work. They
all had to go through Block 61. The death toll varied daily from a
minimum of 10 to about 200 in Block 61. The execution was performed by
injecting phenol into the heart in the most brutal manner. The bodies
were then carted to the crematorium mostly during roll calls or at
night. Finally, extermination was also always assured at the end by
convoys. The convoys which left Buchenwald while the Allies were
advancing were used to assure extermination.
To give an example: At the end of March 1945 elements withdrawn from the
S III detachment arrived at Buchenwald. They were in a state of complete
exhaustion when they arrived and quite unfit for any kind of exertion.
They were the first to be re-expedited, two days after their arrival. It
was only about half a mile from their starting point in the small camp,
that is, at the back of the Buchenwald Camp, to their point of assembly
for roll call; and to give you an idea of the state of weakness in which
these people were, I need only say that between this starting point and
their assembly point, that is, over a distance of half a mile, we saw 60
of them collapse and die. They could not go on further. Most of them
died very soon, in a few hours or in the course of the next day. So much
for the systematic extermination which I witnessed in Buchenwald,
including . . .