The Berlin Senate has pardoned two Nazi criminals serving life sentences. They are 62-year-old Otto Locke, who was responsible for the deaths of seven Jewish inmates of Birkenau concentration camp, and Gottfried Matthes, who, as medical officer in charge of the health office of the Polish town of Grottkau, was to blame for killing Germans suffering from mental illness.
Locks and Matthes have served 20 and 21 years of their sentences respectively and are no longer fit to be held in custody, for, in the view of leading criminologists, prison inmates undergo a personality decline between the 15th and 20th year of imprisonment. For this reason the Berlin Senate is applying the unwritten law of not continuing sentences beyond the 20th year.
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.
