Former Nazi Sentenced to 7 Years Imprisonment; Two Others Freed

A former Nazi was convicted and sentenced yesterday, but two others were freed. Franz Joseph Swidewski, a 50-year-old former SS guard at Treblinka was sentenced in Dusseldorf to seven years’ imprisonment for helping murder 371 Jewish inmates. At the time of the crimes, he was in his early 20s.

In Hamburg, an eight-month trial ended in the acquittal of former Nazi police commissioner Walter Becker, 74, of charges of murdering six persons in Starachovice, Poland, and participating in the transporting of Jews from the local ghetto to death camps. The prosecutor had asked for life imprisonment, but the jury cited contradictory evidence.

In Dusseldorf, former Nazi police commissioner Friedrich Niehoff, 57, was acquitted after a four-week trial of killing a child in Mogilev, Russia, in Oct. 1941. The court said that after 30 years “there is insufficient proof to reach a verdict and pass a sentence.”

LIFE SENTENCE ASKED FOR SS OFFICER

In Berlin yesterday, the prosecutor asked life imprisonment for former SS officer Friedrich Bosshammer, 65, accused of murdering some 3300 Italian Jews. During 1942-44, Bosshammer was a member of Adolf Eichmann’s “Jewish Department” in the head security office of the Third Reich. At the end of 1944 he was sent to Italy to organize the “Final Solution” there.

The prosecutor called him an “excessive criminal” who exceeded even Eichmann’s orders, persecuting Italian Jews through personal hatred and to further his career. He said the trial had proved “beyond any doubt” that Bosshammer had known the fate awaiting Jews at Auschwitz and the conditions to be endured on the way there. Bosshammer was a participant in mass murder and not just an “aid to murder,” the prosecutor asserted. The jury is expected to reach a verdict April 11.