Swiss police and Interpol, the international police organization, were teamed today in a hunt for Hans Waiter Zech-Nenntwich, a convicted Nazi war criminal, who fled last Wednesday from a maximum security prison in West Germany to Switzerland. Speculation was mounting, however, that the former SS cavalry officer and a woman companion, had already fled from Switzerland for a possible hideout in South America.
The Nazi, who was convicted last Monday on charges of complicity in the wartime slaughter of 5, 200 Jews in the Pinsk ghetto in Nazi-occupied Russia, was being held in a Brunswick prison, awaiting the outcome of two appeals of the sentence. One was by his attorney and the other by the prosecutor for a stiffer sentence.
A prison warden, Dietrich Zeemann, was arrested in the escape and admitted he had unlocked six prison doors for the Nazi, who had been a comrade from Nazi labor camp service days. The Nazi was picked up by a waiting car and driven by Herman Gutteck, a former cellmate, to the Klausheide airport where the couple took off for the Basle Mulhouse airport. There they took a train headed for central Switzerland. Brunswick police also arrested Gutteck.
Hesse state officials said it appeared that some kind of a Nazi underground organization was in existence, aiding hunted Nazi criminals to escape justice and that Sech-Nenntwich’s escape might be the latest work of the group.
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.
