Friedrich Kuczynski, who during the Nazi occupation of Poland was assigned the Job of liquidating the entire Jewish population of Upper Silesia, was sentenced to death in the Sosnowice district court for responsibility for the murder of more than 100,000 Polish Jew.
The accused succeeded in escaping from Poland after the war ended and spent several months in Germany. When he was apprehended by the U.S. Army authorities, he was returned to this country to stand trial as one of the major war criminals.
At the same time, Kondrat Scheifel was sentenced by the same court to life imprisonment for robbing and torturing numerous Jews from the Sosnowice region. Gestapo chief Bernard Lel received the death sentence from a Lublin court this week for participating in a pogrom in that city’s Ghetto during the war. He was convicted specifically of murdering 15 inmates of a Lublin home for Jewish aged.
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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.