Two former SS officers drew relatively mild sentences Friday for the wartime murders of slave laborers in Poland and Soviet Russia who were used to destroy evidence of Nazi mass murders. Two other defendants were acquitted after a three-month trial in a Stuttgart court. A sentence of four years at hard labor was passed on Hans Sohns, 61, a former SS major who was convicted of having abetted the murders of 280 slave laborers after using them to exhume and burn the remains of other Nazi victims buried in mass graves. Fritz Zietlov, 66, a former SS captain, got a two-and-a-half year sentence for his role in the murder of 30 slave laborers.
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