Bernhard Ramcke, former Nazi general and convicted war criminal, created a minor sensation in Hamburg court today when he asserted Chancellor Konrad Adenauer had asked him to join the new West German army.
Gen. Ramcke, appearing in court in his libel suit against Erich Kuby, a radio writer, testified he had rejected the alleged request because many of his former army comrades were “still rotting in Allied prisons for so-called war crimes.”
Gen. Ramcke, who was convicted by a French court and sentenced to five years at hard labor for war crimes but freed before he finished the first year of his sentence, is suing Kuby for referring to him as a “swine” in a radio play broadcast recently by the Hamburg Broadcasting Station.
He was quoted in the play as having said in a 1952 speech to a group of SS men that the Allies were the real war criminals and that Nazi parachute troop veterans would soon be placed on “lists of honor. ” The general did not object to those citations but did claim libel for being called a “swine.”
Ernest Schnabel, the station manager who was a defense witness for Kuby, justified use of the term, declaring that the general had spoken of the Jews “in terms much worse.
The court today heard passages cited from the general’s remarks during the Hitler period, which included statements that “the Jews have stabbed Germany in the back” and congratulations to Hitler for having “eliminated the putrid influence of Jewry.”
Ramcke disappeared in January 1951, just before he was to be tried by the French court, reappearing some months later when the trial was held at which he received the five-year sentence.
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.
