Four West German peasant families received medals and citations from Israeli Ambassador Asher Ben Nathan Friday for having saved the lives of a Jewish family hunted by Nazis during World War II. The citations were authorized by the Yad Vashem, the martyrs documentation center in Jerusalem which has also planted trees in Israel in the names of the Germans. The peasants sheltered the Jewish family between February, 1943 and the end of the war in 1945.
In a related development, a former guard in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Heinz Zimmerman, was sentenced to one year in prison by a Cologne court for complicity in the shooting of Russian prisoners of war and Jews during World War II.
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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.