Three former Nazis will go on trial in October for their alleged role in the murder of more than 33,000 French Jews between 1942 and 1944, the Cologne prosecutor’s office announced yesterday. The three are Kurt Lischka, who was Hitler’s deputy commander of the Gestapo in France from 1940 to 1943, and two of his colleagues, Herbert Hagen and Ernst Heinrichsohn. The three were indicted June, 1978, but were not arrested.
In 1950, a French court sentenced Lischka in absentia to hard labor for his part in deporting 100,000 French Jews and Communists to Nazi concentration camps. He remained free, however, because the West German constitution prevented German subjects from being extradited. But in 1975, West Germany’s Parliament ratified a treaty with France permitting Lischka and his colleagues to be tried in Cologne.
The prosecution spokesman said the three men are charged with being responsible for deporting at least 73,000 Jews to Auschwitz and other death camps in Poland and that of these, 33,592 were sent to their deaths in gas chambers. According to the prosecutor’s office, Lischka, a retired clerk living in Cologne, has not responded to the charges but the other two men have denied personal responsibility.
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