Afternoon Session
MARSHAL: If the Court please, it is desired to announce that the Defendant Kaltenbrunner will be absent from this afternoon’s session on account of illness.
THE PRESIDENT: You may go on, M. Dubost.
M. DUBOST: We are going to complete the hearing of the witness Veith, to whom, however, I have only one more question to put.
THE PRESIDENT: Have him brought in.
[The witness, Veith, took the stand.]
M. DUBOST: You continue to testify under the oath that you already made this morning.
Will you give some additional information concerning the execution of the 47 Allied officers whom you saw shot in 48 hours at Camp Mauthausen where they had been brought?
VEITH: Those officers, those parachutists, were shot in accordance with the usual systems used whenever prisoners had to be done away with. That is to say, they were forced to work to excess, to carry heavy stones. Then they were beaten until they took heavier ones; and so on and so forth until, finally driven to extremity, they turned towards the barbed wire. If they did not do it of their own accord, they were pushed there; and they were beaten until they did so; and the moment they approached it and were perhaps about one meter away from it, they were mown down by machine guns fired by the SS guards in the watchtowers. This was the usual system for the “killing for attempted escape” as they afterwards called it.
Those 47 men were killed on the afternoon of the 6th and morning of the 7th of September.