The 25-year-old son of a former Dachau camp guard was sentenced today to seven months imprisonment for slander and defamation of the dead. The prisoner, Martin Siegler, created an uproar last week among visitors to the museum erected at the camp site in memory of the Nazi victims exterminated there, when he told an attendant that the crematorium had been constructed by the Americans after the war as a propaganda device.
Siegler also said to the Jewish attendant, who was a former inmate of the camp, that “They must have forgotten to shove you into the oven.” The prisoner claimed that his father was an SS guard at the camp who had been sentenced to a 15-year jail term but had served only five years.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
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.