Anders Engström 🌻

Josef Klehr, an SS medic at Auschwitz who was sentenced to life for at least 475 murders, most by injection, and for helping gas more than 2,000 people: “[Death by injection] wasn’t as cruel as gassing. Gassing was a cruel death.” “I saw the bodies coming out. [...] With the injection, I tell you, he collapsed before the syringe was empty. With gassing, though, the humming went on for at least ten minutes. And it kept growing fainter.” Interviewer: “No one ever pleaded with you, begged you to let them live?” Klehr: “No, never. That is exactly what I always wondered about, you know. They could always have said, ‘Please let me live,’ or something. Not a sound. Not a sound was uttered.” He was tried in Frankfurt and found guilty of leading the camp’s gassing squad and of having at least once poured the Zyklon B into the gas chamber. The interesting part is that he never denied the gassings, just his part in them. You see this over and over in the testimony, where everyone agrees on what happened, but almost no one admits to being the one who did it. This is sourced from a 1978 interview from Ebbo Demant’s 1999 doc Drei deutsche Morder. I clipped the footage and added English subtitles translated from his German, which were checked and edited by @gaemsae , a native speaker who has been a huge help with this.