A small item in the German press has led the Haifa branch of the Organization of Nazi Fighters, Victims of the Nazi Regime and Survivors of Death Camps to demand that a 78-year-old German pensioner be tried for Nazi crimes.
The item reported that former SS officer Otto Winckelmann had asked the German authorities to increase his pension from 1700 marks ($535.50) to 4000 marks ($1260) a month because he was a former general and not just a former executive. The survivors’ group advised the Ludwigsburg prosecutor that Winckelmann had been appointed by SS chief Heinrich Himmler in 1944 as supreme German commander in Hungary, and that it was Winckelmann who had issued the orders, carried out by Adolf Eichmann, to deport 400,000 Hungarian Jews to death camps. The survivors’ group also charged that Winckelmann transferred $3 billion worth of stolen Jewish property to Germany.
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.
