Sixteen former SS and Gestapo members went on trial here today on charges of participation in the wartime murder of 160,000 Polish Jews.
The defendants worked in Gestapo headquarters and in a slave labor camp near Lvov, then in occupied Poland. The trial, one of the largest in the lengthy list of such war crimes cases in postwar Germany, is expected to last a year. More than 140 witnesses from the United States, Israel, Canada, Poland, Austria, France and Australia will testify. Court officials said they will send representatives to New York during the trial to take testimony from witnesses unable to come to Stuttgart.
Some of the defendants were accused of being members of “Special Squad 1005,” whose assignment was to open mass graves and burn the remains of murdered Jews to erase evidence of the crimes from the advancing Soviet armies. Most of the 16 former Nazis have been charged with complicity in the mass murders of Jews in the Lvov area and with individual killings.
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