The clerk who saw it all

By Steve Rodan

The narrative of the Holocaust promoted by German historians and adopted by Israel's Yad Vashem was that Berlin embarked on mass murder only in 1942 after efforts to resettle the Jews in the Soviet Union and Africa failed. Yad Vashem's chief researcher and leading Holocaust expert, Yehuda Bauer, staked his reputation on the claim that there was no evidence that Hitler planned mass murder until 1941. Bauer's claim was contradicted by German officials and witnesses that Hitler had decided on extermination in 1939 and the systematic killing of Jews began even earlier.

Issak Egon Ochshorn provided one of the most graphic and detailed testimony of German murder and bloodlust before World War II. Born in 1901 in Galicia, Ochshorn worked as a bookkeeper in Vienna and his clients included the American Joint Distribution Committee. In March 1938, the Germans seized Ochshorn's business. He tried to return to Poland, but Warsaw said he had lost his right to enter. Soon, he was arrested with 2,000 other Jews and held in cellars around Vienna. On Oct. 2, 1939, the Jews were taken to Buchenwald. He was appointed clerk, and for four hours a day able to examine records on Buchenwald’s policy of killing Jews.

Ten percent of the work party failed to return each day. I, myself, overheard the camp commandant Schober give to SS man Hinkemann the order 'I want at least one hundred Jewish death reports in the camp office every day.'

Two months later, on Jan. 1, 1940, Schober ordered that all so-called Jewish intellectuals at Buchenwald undergo torture and death. The commandant was specific: those with university doctorates or similar academic credentials, along with rabbis and anybody else deemed an intellectual, would be buried up to their necks. Helpless and with only their heads above the ground, the Jews would starve. About 80 people suffered such a fate. Schober introduced other means of torture and death at Buchenwald.

I myself after my duties as clerk had been completed for the day, was sometimes ordered to disinter the bodies and carry them to the crematorium. I also personally witnessed the dispatch of prisoners in the sick bay by the injection by the medical staff of lethal doses.

For the sadistic pleasure of the SS guards as well as to fulfill the death quota, prisoners were chased by the kapos into a gauntlet of SS officers, who shot and killed them. All the bodies were then disposed of in a crematorium. Ochshorn, himself, was made to run the gauntlet of SS men who beat him with leather whips and clubs studded with metal. After the failed assassination of Hitler on Nov. 9, 1939, he and other inmates were denied food or water for 11 days.

It was a common occurrence at Buchenwald and one frequently witnessed by me that the camp commandant gave the order to the 'capos' directing them to chase prisoners through a line of sentries who then shot at them and their records were marked with 'Shot whilst trying to escape.'

On Sept. 27, 1940: Ochshorn was transferred to Dachau. There, he witnessed how the German extermination was directed by Heinrich Himmler. The SS chief would visit the camp often and once interviewed Ochshorn in the hospital. Himmler asked the Jew why he was in Dachau.

I replied to him that I was a Communist. Himmler in my presence directed when infuriated by a Jew in the sick bay that all Jews reporting sick should be liquidated.

The Germans intensified the brutality at Dachau. He saw the "live bodies of prisoners being thrown in concrete mixers and there brought to their death in a most horrible manner.

In the summer of 1941, Ochshorn and other Jews were sent to Gross-Rosen. Again, he assumed clerical duties. By this time, the Germans were killing Jews in gas chambers.

While at Gross-Rosen acting as schreiber [writer], I noted the number of persons who were gassed since it is my duty as camp clerk to list the numbers of those who were done away with. While at Gross-Rosen, I personally witnessed the murder of many persons who were thrown alive into a pit and covered with snow until they were suffocated.

From Gross-Rosen, Ochshorn finally returned to Poland -- taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau in October 1942. He testified how the Germans concealed the mass murder at the camp. Auschwitz was presented as a model camp and visited by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

But Birkenau was reserved for the greatest of atrocities. He recalled Block 27, where "innumerable prisoners" were placed in the gas chambers. Again, he saw Himmler frequently and heard the SS chief call "for more cruel treatment. He witnessed the torture of women and children, classified as medical experiments, by Josef Mengele.

Ochshorn testified of the German cruelty toward infants and children. He saw somebody he identified as Hauptscharfuherer Moll and five other SS men seize 386 children "under age 10 by the hair and shoot them."

Ochshorn was taken from Auschwitz to a penal camp in Warsaw. As the Red Army approached, he and other Jews were made to march to Dachau on Oct. 7, 1944.

Ochshorn’s testimony on Sept. 5, 1945 was considered credible by the U.S. Office of Chief of Counsel, which began preparing the Nuremberg trials. It also contributed to the opinion of the Allied judges that the Holocaust had been planned from the start.

The survivor's testimony was supported by German documents and captured Nazis that Hitler had sought the extermination of all Jews even before the first shot was fired in World War II. Soon after the war, a leading German confirmed that extermination had been approved following the conquest of Poland in September 1939.

Ochshorn didn't need that confirmation. He was one of the few Jews who saw every stage of the Holocaust and survived.

[Ochshorn's testimony at Nuremberg can be found at the University of Connecticut library. https://collections.ctdigitalarchive.org/islandora/object/20002%3A199716113]

Below: survivors of Buchenwald in 1945