Four former SS and gestapo officers have been sentenced in Wiesbaden for complicity in the wartime extermination of Jews in the Lublin area of Poland from 1941 to 1944.
Harry Sturm, 60, was sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment for abetting the murder of at least 8900 Jews. Sturm had been out of custody since 1964 on DM 50,000 bail. Gotthard Schubert, 59, was given six years for complicity in murdering 28,000 Jews. He was released, however, because he had already been imprisoned in the Soviet Union for the same crimes. Bruno Melert, 55, was acquitted.
The trial lasted two-and-a-half years. More than 200 witnesses testified, telling how ground water had been red with blood from mass graves, and how thousands had died in the Belcec extermination camp through poisoning by diesel fumes. They told of orphans and mentally handicapped persons being murdered, of babies being thrown out of hospital windows into waiting trucks.
Most of this testimony was directed against Sturm. The court judge described the acts as “unimaginable cruelty,” cruelty on a scale which those who demanded an end to such trials could not conceive of.
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