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Gestapo ‘expert’ Indicted in Germany for Killing 100,000 Lodz Jews

April 6, 1961
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Guenther Fuchs, the one-time “Jewish expert” of the Gestapo in Lodz in Nazi-occupied Poland, has been indicted for responsibility in the murder of “about 100,000 Jews” in the Lodz Ghetto, it was announced today.

The 49-year-old Gestapo official was working for the Lower Saxony Refugee Ministry when he was arrested last May. He was indicted in Hanover. Preliminary investigation was reported underway in Munich also against Dr. Bradfisch, a former Lodz Gestapo chief, on charges he headed an Einsatz Commando execution squad in the Smolensk area.

Trial will open before the Kassel Jury Court today against two former high-ranking police officers charged with complicity in the murder of 500 to 700 Jews in Sluzk, White Russia, during the Nazi occupation. More than 30 witnesses will testify against former Police Colonel Franz Lechthaler, 70, and Police Chief Commissar Willi Papenkort, 52. Papenkort was serving on the Essen police force when he was arrested last summer.

Otto Haupt, a former SS medical officer, was arrested in Ueberlingern near Stuttgart, today on charges of complicity in the murder of about 1,000 inmates of the Danzig Stutthof concentration camp from 1940 to 1941.

The observance of a memorial in Dortmund for political victims murdered by the Dortmund Gestapo on Good Friday in 1944 was marked by a denunciation of the West German judiciary by Gerhard Jahn, a Social Democratic deputy in the West German Parliament and chairman of the Parliamentary indemnification committee.

The deputy charged that many judges and prosecutors who had served the Nazi judicial system were still holding posts in West German courts and that many had shown they had not recanted for their Nazi pasts by demonstrating leniency toward right-wing movements in West Germany and in their judgments of Nazi crimes brought before them.

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