A former Nazi SS guard has received a life sentence for killing Gypsies at Auschwitz.
Ernst-August Koenig, 71, was convicted last Thursday in Siegen, Germany, a town east of Bonn, following a 44-month trial.
Koenig was a retired forester who referred to himself as an “angel of Auschwitz” who never hurt anyone. He was found guilty of killing three Gypsies with his own hands and of aiding in two instances of mass gassing of 3,258 Gypsies.
Some 160 witnesses were heard at the trial, which was the first to sentence someone explicitly for killing Gypsies.
Trials were conducted in the 1950s against Nazis accused of killing Gypsies, but they were all abandoned for one reason or another, according to the judge in the trial, Dirk Batz.
Charges were brought against him by a Gypsy group called the German Sinti and Romany Council. The Sinti and Romany are two ethnic groups of Gypsies living in Germany.
Koenig was found not guilty of helping gas more than 21,000 Gypsies and 50 Jews between 1943 and 1944, due to insufficient evidence.
Defense attorneys argued it was too late to charge him under a law that states that only crimes committed before 1945 under Nazi instructions can still be tried.
The prosecutor general of the Cologne Office for the Prosecution of Nazi Crimes, Hans-Joachim Roseler, in his closing statement two months ago, said, “The ugliest murder in the history of crime cannot surpass the atrocities of National Socialism. What happened 47 years ago in Auschwitz puts everything else in the shadow” and is beyond “any human comprehension.”
Ironically, an accusation made erroneously against Koenig, that he was commander of the “Canada section” of Auschwitz, helped in locating another SS guard.
Three Canadian Holocaust survivors who were summoned to Koenig’s trial as witnesses confirmed Koenig “killed untold numbers of Gypsies, but he wasn’t the Canada Koenig of the SS,” Dr. Rudolf Vrba of Vancouver said in October 1989.
NOT THE LAST NAZI TRIAL
Verba helped identify Heinrich Johannes Kuehnemann, a well-known opera singer from Essen, as the man known at Auschwitz as the “koenig” or king of Canada.
Kuehnemann was called as a witness against Koenig and was himself fingered as a war criminal when he took the witness stand.
Gypsies say some 20,000 Gypsies died at Auschwitz-Birkenau and that some 250,000 Gypsies were killed in the Holocaust.
Gypsies, like Jews, were deported to Eastern Europe. Several thousand Gypsies were sent to the Lodz Ghetto. In 1942, Gypsies were sent to Auschwitz, Chelmno and Mauthausen death camps.
The Koenig trial has been reported in Germany as probably the last big Nazi trial because most Nazi suspects are believed to be dead. That is disputed by Elliot Welles, director of the Nazi Task Force of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith in New York.
This trial is “not going to be the last one,” said Welles. “There are other investigations, too,” regarding “certain cases that were found in the U.N. war crimes archives. Those cases were sent to different prosecutors.”
The suspects are all at least in their early 60s but with many a good deal older.
There are currently other accused former Nazis either on or awaiting trial in Germany, including Boleslavs Maikovskis, 85, a former commander of a Latvian pro-Nazi police force, and Josef Schwammberger, 79, accused of brutally killing at least 5,000 Jews at several concentration camps in Poland.
The Maikovskis trial, which began a year ago and is expected to continue until June, is held every Monday and Thursday in Munster. “The files are so heavy and so thick and go back to 1965, when he was sentenced to death in Riga, Latvia,” said Welles of ADL.
The Schwammberger trial is slated to begin in Stuttgart in about three months. Close to 100 surviving witnesses are expected to testify.
(JTA staff writer Susan Birnbaum in New York contributed to this report.)
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.
