Professor Rudolf Schiedermair, president of the Bavarian Administrative Court in Wuerzberg, who has been charged with participation in Nazi terror judgments in special wartime courts in occupied Norway, asked today that he be suspended from office.
He made the request after a West German Government spokesman disclosed that efforts were being made to obtain court records from Norway where Dr. Schiedermair was sentenced in 1949 to two years’ imprisonment for participation in judgments which resulted in death sentences for relatively minor offenses. In his request, made in Wuerzberg, the jurist also asked that disciplinary proceedings be started against him.
The West German Interior Ministry, describing the case as an “unpleasant” one, said that Dr. Schiedermair did not indicate, when he joined the West German judiciary, that he had been an SS officer and that he had worked in the Nazi party central office in drafting plans for the “final solution of the Jewish question” in Bohemia and Moravia.
The jurist previously said he had been cleared of Nazi collaboration by a special court in Oslo. The Ministry of the Interior on Tuesday asked the Oslo court to furnish relevant documents on the jurist’s 1949 conviction and sentencing.
The jurist also said, prior to his request for suspension, that he had worked in the Nazi Interior Ministry where he took part in the drafting of the racist Nuremberg laws. He said he worked in that post under Hans Globke, now State Secretary in the office of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. That statement was denied here today by Dr. Globke, who said that the jurist had not worked in the same department with him but in another one.
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.