The Council of Hungarian Peoples Courts, the ## Appellate tribunal in all war crimes cases, has sentenced Gyula Simon, the judge who condemned Chana Szenes to death during the war, to a seven-year prison term.
The appeals court’s decision, which was published here today, is based on its endings that Simon did not give the Jewish heroine, who parachuted into Hungary ## organize the escape of Jewish slave laborers from the country, a fair trial and ordered her execution without publicly announcing sentence. A lower court originally advertence Simon to one year and then suspended sentence under a general amnesty decree.
Simon, who headed the military court trying Szenee for espionage, based his defense on an order from Feketehalmi Czeydner, chief of the Hungarian general staff, for the immediate execution of Szenes. The appeals court ruled that as a judge he would not have obeyed an obviously illegal order. Czeydner was executed in Yugoslavia for ordering a massacre of Yugoslav civilians by Hungarian occupation troops ?ring the war.
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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.
