The District Court at nearby Augsburg imposed a nine-month prison sentence for fraud upon former Bavarian “Chief Rabbi” Dr. Aron Ohrenstein but for the first time in a series of trials and appeals stretching over the past five years, placed him on probation.
Dr. Ohrenstein was charged with helping a small group of people obtain wrongful indemnification payments by attesting that he had administered a “rabbinical doth” in Wildflecken camp to certain Jewish DP’s, who either did not exist or else had already emigrated from Germany. In 1952, he was given a year in jail and a fine.
Following his appeal, the German Supreme Court confirmed the finding of guilty, and later a Munich court again handed down a one-year sentence, this time without adding a fine. A second appeal by Dr. Ohrenstein to the Supreme Court was rejected and when he was about to board an airplane bound for Switzerland in December 1955 the German authorities sent him to jail to begin serving his sentence.
Two months later he was released, however, on the basis of a precedent-setting decision by the Federal Constitutional Court, which later overruled the Supreme Court and held that the Munich judge in the last previous trial had been assigned outside the normal sequence and hence improperly. For that reason the Constitutional Court ordered the case transferred to Augsburg for retrial. Dr. Ohrenstein is now engaged in business at Munich. He is planning legal steps to have the entire case reopened on the basis of new evidence.
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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.
