Sergeant goes back to accuse his Nazi tortures

Taken from the Evening Standard - November 26 1945




‘Taffy’ Edwards, scarred and limping, is in London on his way to Dachau

Sergeant goes back to accuse his Nazi torturers

Evening Standard Reporter EVELYN IRONS


In London on his way to Dachau is a 35-year old soldier with a scarred face and a limp. He is Sergeant E.L. Edwards, of the Welch Regiment. Last time he entered Dachau he was kicked, beaten and tortured.
This time he goes as witness against the men who kicked, beat and tortured.
He will give evidence against some of the 40 people who ran Dachau camp and whose trial in a U.S. military court began on November 15.
Sergeant Edwards, a regular soldier now acting as mess caterer at a Glasgow transit camp, was married last Monday at his native Cardiff to Lilian Hurley, the girl who never gave up hope he was alive.
An hour after the wedding a telegram summoned him to London to await an airplane to Munich en route for Dachau.
There is one Nazi in particular whom Taffy Edwards wants to confront at the Dachau trial.
His name is Kik, political agent of the Gestapo.
Dressed in the striped concentration camp uniform of a political prisoner. Edwards protested to Kik that he was a British prisoner of war. After a 3 a.m. grilling during which he tried to force Edwards to deny his British nationality. Kik shouted “You are a liar.”
“I knew no more,” the sergeant told me, “until I came to at 7.30 next morning outside the camp hospital, with my teeth knocked out and gashes on my head and over the left eye.
“I was told as my wounds were stitched with ordinary needle and thread that I was to see Kik again next day.”
“When I appeared a second time I could not speak through my split and swollen mouth. When Kik demanded, ‘You are not English are you?’ I could only nod to tell him yes, I was. He struck me again on the mouth.
Sergeant Dachau the
In the camp where minutes he was hanged by the left arm from an iron clamp fixed to the wall. He is still unable to use that arm.
Edwards first arrived at Dachau on a cold, wet day in October, 1943, after a five-day train journey, during which he had only one piece of bread to eat.
The handcuffs which held him fixed to a post in the rail truck had to be sawn off because his wrists were so swllen.
With 60 other prisoners of many nations, including two British submarine men; he was made to stand naked in the big square for three hours.
All of the men were then ordered in groups of five into the shower baths, where they stood under ice-cold water after the skin had been scalded off their shoulders by a boiling hot shower.
After a final hot shower they were lined up in the square again. Twenty of these men died of pneumonia, the sergeant told me.
That first day at Dachau, Edwards was beaten up six times for such “offences” as failing to answer when his name was called in an unrecognisable German accent.
“I was lucky,” he grinned wryly. “I missed the gas chamber and the 25.”
He saw eight Greeks who had the “25.” They had their feet clamped in an iron box, and their heads forced down while they were beaten 25 times on the naked flesh with a yard-long piece of rubber pipe.
Taffy Edwards used to weigh close on 11 stone. When he came out of Dachau after eight months his weight had dropped to 5 stone.