Three former high ranking SS leaders have gone oil trial in Munich on charges of having participated in the mass murders of thousands of Jews in Russia during World War II. The defendants were all members of the top leadership of the elite Einsatzkommandos which was active in the Soviet Union from Jan. 1941-1943. Their method of murder was to force Jews to stand with their backs to previously dug mass graves and shoot them down. Babies and small children in their mothers’ arms were buried alive.
Brought to trial Monday were Karl Finger. 61. charged with abetting the murder of 3128 Jews in southern Russia, mainly between 1941-42; Siegfried Suchart, 54, charged with the same crime in the deaths of 3100 Jews; and Theodor Lipps, 55, accused of personally murdering 250 persons, including 30 Jews. Until his arrest in 1968, Lipps was Chief Commissioner of Police, Criminal Division, in Cologne.
Finger confessed yesterday that he gave orders to carry out mass murders in Czernowitz in July, 1942 but claimed he “did not know that all of the 100 men and women ordered to be shot were Jews.” Asked by the judge who he thought they were, he replied, “civilian looters.” Finger claimed that he was “always against the persecution of Jews except for emergency actions during the war.”
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