The prosecution opened its case today against Horst Wagner of Duesseldorf, a 60-year-old former high official of the Nazi Foreign Ministry who is charged with participating in the murder and deportation of 356,000 Jews. Investigations of the charges against Wagner have been in progress since 1959. Wagner is free on bail in spite of the vast number of murders involved in the charges against him.
In Bremen, the prosecutor in the trial of Fritz Hildebrand, a former SS officer in occupied Galicia, demanded life imprisonment at hard labor today for the defendant. He charged that Hildebrand had been proved to have arranged for the shooting of 2,000 Jews in February and July 1943 on orders of Fritz Katzmann, the Nazi police chief in Galicia.
The prosecutor also said that the evidence had shown that Hildebrand on his own initiative had ordered the shooting of three Jews who escaped but were recaptured in June 1944 in Boryslaw. Hildebrand had the three victims shot “to set an example,” the prosecutor told the jury court.
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