West German police launched a search throughout West Germany today for Ludwig Zind, the chemistry teacher who was sentenced to a year in jail in 1958 for anti-Semitic utterances but who fled to Egypt while awaiting action on an appeal from the sentence.
Baden-Wurtemburg police appealed to West Germans in a television broadcast to help in the search. The hunt was based on the belief that Zind was or is in West Germany. Police learned that Zind allegedly wrote a letter from Nuremberg to a friend in Cairo as well as five postcards in his handwriting which were recently mailed to acquaintances in West Germany from Munich.
It was also disclosed today that West German President Heinrich Luebke had received a letter pleading for a pardon for Zind, who was accused of declaring publicly that “not enough Jews had been gassed.” The signer of the letter was not indicated. Zind was last reported to be teaching at the American University in Libya.
The contents of the Zind letter to a friend in Cairo were disclosed yesterday in a dispatch by the German Press Agency correspondent in Cairo who reported that Zind had written that he had been traveling through West Germany and Italy for the past three months “always shadowed by the Israel secret service.”
According to the German News Agency report, as published in Frankfurt, Zind had written that though his presence in West Germany was known to “a wide circle of acquaintances and relatives, “he had not been denounced to police.”
Zind said in his letter, according to the Cairo report, that “as a matter of fact,” he was protected by his friends against “the Israeli secret police who were trying to create a second Eichmann case,” a reference to the seizure of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi war criminal seized in Buenos Aires this spring.
Zind disappeared from his home in Offenburg 24 hours after the West German Federal Supreme Court had rejected his appeal from the one-year sentence. His escape to Egypt provoked a political storm in West Germany.
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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.
