WORLD

By TOM FOLEY
The Pentagon admitted Mar..5 that all
of the U.S. Air Force tapes recording
communications with the Korean Airlines
Flight 007 were erased within hours after
the plane was shot down over Soviet terri-
tory on Sept. 1, 1983.

The facts were revealed during a
Washington lawsuit hearing this week and
admitted by Pentagon spokesman Michael
Burch.

The Washington lawsuit against the
U.S. government was brought by a
number of relatives of the victims and
charges that the KAL 007 was on a spy
mission when it penetrated Soviet air
space over vital Soviet strategic defence
installations.

Burch said that the tape monitored the
KAL 007 flight and claimed it was “rou-
tinely erased for re-use” a few hours after it
was learned the plane with its 269 pas-

sengers and crew had been shot down.

All the USAF tapes at the Regional
Command Post in Anchorage, Alaska, in
any way related to the KAL 007 flight
were erased, testimony at the Washington
hearing revealed.

Alexander Shalnev, Washington cor-
respondent for the Soviet news agency
TASS, said that “the erasing of the tapes is
no accident.

“They would probably have supplied
indubitable evidence of the fact that the
USAF ground tracking stations, in partic-
ular those in Alaska, knew about the devi-
ation of KAL 007 from its regular route
but took no measures to correct its flight.
In other words, the tapes would shave

supplied further proof that the deviation ~

of the plane from its course had been pre-
planned so that it should fly over parts of
the Soviet Far East that were of special
interest to the U.S. intelligence services,”
Shalnev said.

U.S. Air Force erased KAL 007 tapes

In the time since the KAL 007 was shot
down, more and more evidence has
mounted that it was indeed on a spy mis-
sion, but the Reagan administration has
stonewalled all efforts to probe further.
Intelligence communications expert David
Pearson, writing in the Aug. 18-25, 1984
issue of The Nation magazine, called for a
Congressional investigation into the
cover-up.

Pearson stresed that “‘one year after the
downing of KAL 007, a careful and tho-
rough analysis of new, complex and tech-
nical evidence now in the public record,
leads to the inescapable conclusion that
offical U.S. accounts of the incident are
neither complete nor credible.” He said
that at least a half-dozen U.S. military and
intelligence agencies “had to have known
that Flight 007 was off course well prior to
the attack over Sakhalin. ..The agencies
had the time and means to communicate

with KAL 007 and correct its course, but
not one. of them did so.”

The article by Pearsori also brought out
the fact that administration pleas that its
military radar could not follow the flight
were false. The Pentagon did not tell Con-
gress that in fact it has a classified system
of “bending” radar ‘signals, thus giving
them an over-the-horizon range.

Even more suspicious was the refusal to
testify in the Washington lawsuit of
former KAL Capt. Y.M. Park. Park was
flying KAL flight 015 which took off from
Anchorage barely 14 minutes after KAL
007 and relayed radio mesages for it. An
attorney for KAL announced last October
that Park had resigned “for personal rea-
sons” and therefore would not attend the
Washington hearing and would not give
any testimony. Reporters’ efforts to con-
tact Park since then have been unsuccess-
ful.

Remembering the
final liberation
from Auschwitz

By DANIELA IACONDO

OSWIECIM (POLAND): — Teodor
Liese could hear the artillery fire of the
approaching Soviet army as he lay in his
hospital bed, his lungs wracked by pneu-
monia, his body emaciated from mal-
nutrition and hard labor at the Nazi’s
Auschwitz concentration camp.

Forty years ago on the morning of Jan.
27, 1945, he lifted himself from his bed to
fetch some water for breakfast. As he
limped towards the prisoners’ barracks to
boil the water, Liese saw one of the first
Soviet soldiers to enter Auschwitz, the big-
gest and longest-running concentration and
extermination camp set up by Nazi Ger-
many in World War Two.

“I remember the
face of the Soviet
soldier very well,”
Liese said in a recent
interview, recalling
the day the Soviet
front arrived at the
southern Polish town
of Oswiecim (Ausch-] =
witz in German). : a

“I would recognize him today, so well
have his features been imprinted on my
memory. Had I been a millionaire, I would
have given him everything.

“Tt was the most beautiful, the most pre-
cious day of my life,” said Liese, 68. “I was
given life.”

Liese, then 28, was one of about 2,820
prisoners — including about 180 children,
52 of them under the age of eight — who
were liberated by the Soviets from the
sprawling Auschwitz camp that included
the nearby Birkenau and Monowice camps.

An estimated four million people per-
ished at the Auschwitz-complex, including
about 2.5 million Jews. The exact number
‘has never been determined since the Hazis
destroyed passport and personal docu-
ments along with their victims.

Just days. before the Soviets reached the
camp, the retreating Germans forced about
53,000 Auschwitz inmates to march 85
miles to three different camps. They left
behind only those too sick to walk. *

“Before the liberation, we could hear the
approaching front,” Liese said. “We felt
freedom coming. We awaited it with impa-
tience, but we were afraid. We had heard
the Germans planned to blow the camp up.
We were afraid we wouldn’t live until they

10 e PACIFIC TRIBUNE, MARCH 20, 1985

arrived. Every day we expected to die, to be
sent to the cremating furnace.”

Liese, a violinst, was arrested by the
Nazis at his Warsaw home at the age of 26,
during a wave of mass arrests in Poland.

At Auschwitz, Liese did various jobs,
mostly cleaning and garbage collection. He
was also forced to play the violin in the
camp orchestra. :

“Tt was our duty to play marches twice a
day when prisoners left the camp to work
outside (in nearby German munitions fac-
tories) and when they returned,” Liese said.

“The Germans set up the orchestra as a
means of propaganda so when people out-
side herad the music, they would think we
were being well taken care of.” _

Besides the struggling group of prisoners,
most of whom were too sick to get out of
their straw beds or too confused by mal-
nutrition to realize what was happening, the
Soviet army also found 15,400 pounds of
human hair, shaved from prisoners and
packed in paper bags destined for process-
ing into. upholstery at German factories in
Bavaria.

They found 348,000 suits of men’s
clothes, 836,000 women’s dresses, 43,000
pairs of shoes, 14,000 carpets and thousands
of eyeglasses, tooth brushes, shaving
brushes, artifical limbs and household arti-
cles belonging to the prisoners.

They found hundreds of suitcases from
some 28 countries. The owners had written
their names in large letters to identify their
luggage at the Owsiecim train station, which
many thought was just a stop on their way
to “resettlement” elsewhere.

There were hundreds of empty tin cans of
Cyclon B, the poison used to gas people to
death in the camp’s notorious gas
chambers. They also found documents the
Nazis used to try and cover up the killings,
listing causes of death as “influenza” or
“cardiac arrest.”

But they discovered only a remanant of
what had been stacked in the camp’s store-
rooms, which the Germans hurriedly emp-
tied of valuables as the Soviets approached.
The best goods had been transported to
Germany throughout the war.

The departing Nazi soldiers torched the
storage building as they fled the Soviet
advance.

The horror of Auschwitz was mirrored in
other Nazi concentration camps.

Historian Terry Charman of Britain’s

Some of the 180 children left in the Nazi’s Auschwitz concentration camp at the
time of the Soviet liberation in January, 1945.

Imperial War Museum said a story filed by
the London Sunday Times correspondent
on the first camp to be liberated by the
Soviets — the Majandek camp near the
eastern Polish city of Lublin, freed in late
July, 1944 — was held up by his desk in
London. It was never published.

“No one could believe the enormity of
the crimes in the beginning,” said Charman.

He said the first story to be published in
Britain about Majandek was a two-page
spread with pictures that appeared in the
weekly Illustrated News magazine on Oct.
18, a full three months after the liberation.

Two years later, the Polish government
decreed the camp at Auschwitz should be
set up as a permanent museum to stand as
testimony to the horrors of the Nazi regime.

The large barrack’s rooms, where
hundreds of prisoners shivered in bunks
and two prisoners there shared a straw bed
and a blanket, have been left unheated as in
World War Two. Pon

The tons of hair, discolored by the effects
of cyclon B gas, are in a huge glass display,
which takes up the length of one room.
Nothing else adorns the large, drafty space.

The hundreds of cans of Cyclon B, the
eyeglasses, the tooth brushes, the suitcases,
examples of shabby prison clothing and

doctored Nazi documents have all been put
in separate glass displays — an effective
way of conveying the enormity of the crime.

Guided hour-long tours of the museum
are offered and a 20-minute film shot by
Soviet soldiers after their arrival at the camp
is shown, with sound tracks in English and
French.

More than half-a-million people from all
over the world visited the museum in 1983,
museum officials said.

Adam Zlobnicki, 72, an Auschwitz pri-
soner for four months at the end of 1943,

‘takes care of some 15 groups of young West
Germans who visit the camp for 10-day

- stays each year.

Zlobnicki said West Germans “feel they _
have a moral obligation to come.” The
youth groups stay for 10 days, during which
they clean the museum, do odd chores and
attend lectures and seminars on Auschwitz.

Zlobnicki and museum director Kazi-
mierz Smolen, who was also an Auschwitz
prisoner, both live on the camp grounds in
apartments once occupied by SS troopps.

“[’ve separated myself,” Zlobnicki said
about living in a place where he said he
nearly died 42 years ago.” But the memories
will never fade.”

— New Age