Dr. Hermann Fischer, a German physician convicted of having been “an accessory to murder” in Nazi concentration camps, was sentenced by German court here to three years’ imprisonment at hard labor. He served as physician in the notorious Oranienburg. Sachsenhausen, Bercen-Belsen and Flossenburg camps.
After joining the SS in 1931and rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel while serving in a succession of concentration camps, Dr. Fischer ordered the killing of sick or exhausted inmates by injecting them intravenously with excess doses of such drugs as phenol and novocaine or, when the supply gave out, simply of benzole. The prosecutor had asked a six-year penitentiary tern, but the court ruled that the defendant’s “great age”–he is 72–would be taken into account as a mitigating circumstance.
Dr. Fischer, who practiced in Duesseldorf until the opening of the trial, pleaded in self-defense that, as an officer of the German Army in the First World War, he had learned to obey orders and that, during his tenure as concentration camp physical all he had done was to obey orders of the “Chief of Concentration Camp Medical Affairs,” Dr. Enno Lolling. to “liquidate” prisoners who had fallen ill.
Dr. Fischer was first tried before the same court last year, but at that time the jury had to be dismissed when defense attorney Alfred Seidl, who specializes in securing the acquittal of Nazi concentration camp killers, refused to proceed with his final plea as long as it was being recorded, with the permission of the court, by the Bavarian Radio.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
