The leniency shown by German courts on the rare occasions when Nazi crimes still come to trial is denounced in resolution adopted by a regional conference of Social Democratic women.
One of the cases cited in the resolution is that of ex-Wehrmacht Captain Karl Friedrich Noell and ex-Sergeant Emil Zimber, the former a school teacher near Darmstadt and the latter a postwar member of the Freiburg police force. They had been indicted for “participation in murder” because they ordered the slaughter of at least 250 Jews in a village near Smolensk, during the German advance on Moscow in 1941.
The sentences handed down by a Darmstadt court last March were three and two years of imprisonment, respectively. “Thus, the penalty for each murdered Jewish infant is just a few days in jail,” the resolution points out.
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