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Toronto, February 8, 1985


Disease killed Nazis' prisoners, MD says

by Wendy Darroch

 

Belsen girlsTHOUSANDS of prisoners who died at the Bergen Belsen concentration camp during World War II weren't deliberately starved to death but died from a rash of diseases, according to a psychiatrist who was there in 1945.

Russell William Barton, 61, of Rochester, N.Y., said that when he entered the camp on May 2, 1945, he had heard and believed that prisoners were deliberately starved to death by the Nazis.

But Barton, who was a medical student volunteer with the British Red Cross, said if that was true, he couldn't understand why the camp kitchens were so well equipped.

He told a District Court jury yesterday he decided the stories of vicious German inhumanity weren't true after he found books, dating back to 1942, itemizing the amount of food cooked and distributed each day.

The psychiatrist was the second defence witness at the trial of Ernst Zundel, who has pleaded not guilty to two counts of publishing statement he knew were false and likely to incite mischief.

The publication in question are Did Six Million Really Die? which claims that trhe Nazis had no gas chambers and Adolf Hitler never plotted to exterminate the Jews, and The West , War and Islam , which contends Zionists, Freemasons, communists and bankers are conspiring to form a world power.

In his pamphlet Did Six Million Really Die? Zundel, a 46-year-old Carlton St. publisher, has reprinted part of an article written by Barton. He states that Barton's recollection of camp conditions is "a surprisingly honest appraisal of the situation at Belsen in 1945."

Barton, senior associate psychiatrist and attending physician at Strong Memorial Hospital, said the appalling conditions of the camp were likely due to massive overcrowding and the camp administrator's resentment because 50,000 prisoners were kept in a camp for 3,000.

The camp administrator felt it was his responsibility to look after the 3,000 prisoners, not the 50,000 who had arrived after the Russian front began to push west, the doctor said.

Barton said that when he first approached the camp he could smell decaying corpses and feces.

He and another student were assigned to a hut where 400 people were lying on the floor, some of them dead, others were feces and vomit smeared on their faces, some trying to reach for help, the jury was told.

"I was stunned," the doctor said.

The prisoners were suffering from malnutrition, gaster-interitis, typhus, scurvy and a multitude of other diseases, he recalled.

He said that, when he tried to give prisoners protein intravenously, some of them screamed, saying others had died from injections administered by the Germans.

Intravenous injections were new to medicine at the time, Barton said, and the deaths were likely caused by bad reactions to them.

Another defence witness, French professor Robert Faurisson, said the "gas chambers and the genocide together was a fraud which led to a gigantic political and financial fraud."

Israel's former prime minister, David Ben Gurion, had twisted the arm of former West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer in order to obtain reparations payments for the relatives of dead and missing Jews, Faurisson said.

To get those payments, "Ben Gurion committed an enormous fraud" in saying 6 millions Jews were murdered, Faurisson said.

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