The Nuremberg prosecution office reported today it had started an investigation of war crimes charges against one of three men named in the newsmagazine, Der Spiegel, as having served the Nazi regime as euthanasia doctors.
The prosecution said the probe had been opened against Franz Berthold Kihn, professor of psychiatry at Erlangen University. The others listed by the magazine were Prof. Friedrich Mauz of Munster University and Prof. Werner Villinger of Marburg University. The three were accused of having aided the “T-4” euthanasia section in Berlin by selecting mental patients and Jewish hospital patients for death by judging them “unfit to live.”
Simultaneously, it was announced today that the prosecutor in Bochum has begun an investigation into medical experiments conducted at the Buchenwald concentration camp during the Second World War in which inmates were infected with spotted fever. A spokesman for the Bochum prosecutor said that between 1943 and 1945, about 1, 000 prisoners of the Nazis were infected with the disease to test vaccines against it. The prosecutor is seeking former prisoners who survived the experiments to help in the investigation, the spokesman said.
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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.
