©2001 THE MAZAL LIBRARY
	LEST WE FORGET
	The seventeenth day of the trial of the forty members of Auschwitz camp personnel before the Supreme State Tribunal in Cracow was marked by huge numbers of the public who attended it. More than 1,500 persons had to be turned away from the courtroom, the tables of foreign observers were besieged. The trial was also attended by the Consuls of the Soviet Union and of the Republic of France and by the senior members of their respective missions. General Kudryavtsev, chairman of the Extraordinary Soviet Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes came expressly from Moscow. During the trial French witnesses among whom was also the daughter of Professor Langevin, the famous physicist, voiced terrible accusation of the Germans on trial before the Tribunal and of the whole system of which Auschwitz was the symbol. The first to give expert evidence is General Charles Furby, President of the Paris Court of Appeal, Director of Justice attached to the Command of the French occupation zone in Germany, delegate of the French Ministry of Justice for the investigation of German crimes. The expert witness states that he speaks on behalf of the government of the Republic of France generally, and in particular in the name of the French Ministry of Justice which has instructed him to represent French interests at the Auschwitz trial. "I speak also on behalf of those of my compatriots," says General Furby, "who did not return from Auschwitz." General Furby also conveys the thanks of the French Government to the Polish Government for putting at his disposal every facility to enable him to carry out his mission. After detailed examination of conditions obtaining in the concentration camp of Dachau, Mauthausen, Natzweiller and in a number of German camps on French territory, the expert witness emphatically states that of all the camps the Auschwitz camp was the bloodiest and worst. Of Auschwitz's 120,000 French inmates only 3,000 persons returned home to France. "Anyone who was not German was to have been ruthlessly exterminated, and Auschwitz is the most tragic expression of that German aim. If the arrival of the Red Army and Allied victory had not put an end to that massacre," the expert witness goes on to say, "National
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