Eighteen years after the war, there are still more than 600 trials scheduled to take place in Germany of Nazis charged with killing Jews and others in concentration camps and in Nazi-held territories, it was reported here today. The report said that it would take two to three years to complete all the pending cases.
The Federal Supreme Court at Karlsruhe meanwhile ruled today that Nazi General Erich Ehrlinger and his wartime associates–all connected with the notorious Einsatz Commandos who conducted the mass-killing of Jews in Eastern Europe -should stand a new trial.
Ehrlinger had been charged with responsibility in 1,045 cases of murder and sentenced in 1961 to 12 years at hard labor. The prosecution appealed the sentence to the Karlsruhe court as too light. The Supreme court now ordered that the entire case be referred back to the lower court, holding that the crimes committed by the various defendants had to be judged individually and not simply as a joint action.
The prosecution in the mass murder trial of 11 Nazis accused of the murder of 35,000 Jews in the Minsk Ghetto filed an appeal today in Coblenz against a sentence of three years and six months for one of the defendants as too light. The prosecution had asked for a sentence of seven years at hard labor for Artur Harder of Frankfurt, 53.
In another trial, a court in Nuremberg sentenced Joseph Pauer, 61, former Nazi regional police chief in the Ukraine, to seven years hard labor for complicity in the wartime murders of 2,400 Jews. Judge Karl Kristl also sentenced Wilhelm Wacker, 64, another Nazi police official in the Ukraine, to three years and eight months at hard labor for complicity in more than 1,000 of the killings.
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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.
