The State Attorney General announced here today that he has opened a special investigation into the activities of Dr. Ehrhardt Wetzel, an associate of Adolf Eichmann during the Nazi regime, who has been found living in a village near this city. He has been drawing a monthly pension of 1600 deutschemarks (about $400) as a former army officer.
Dr. Wetzel was honorary chairman of the Nazi Party’s Bureau for Racial Policy, and head of the Jewish Affairs bureau in the Nazi Ministry of the Interior. According to the Lower Saxony Ministry of Justice, the-first report of the investigators showed that, in 1941, Wetzel and Eichmann were co-signers of a letter recommending the use of poison gas to kill all Jews in occupied Eastern Europe.
Dr. Wetzel was arrested by Soviet authorities in 1945, and sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment at hard labor. However, he was freed in 1955, and returned to Germany, taking up residence in the village near here. It is understood he was able to keep his identity secret because a Jewish historian, who had identified the name of Wetzel as a war criminal, had mistakenly referred to him as Ernst Wetzel, whereas his true first name is Ehrhardt.
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.
