Former SS Colonel Hedmann Hoefle, who was in jail awaiting trial on charges of participating in the mass killing of Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II, hanged himself in his cell yesterday.
The 51-year-old former Nazi had been named in the trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann and had been arrested in Salzburg last January. The documentary evidence against Hoefle, who had been an assistant to Eichmann, totaled 12,000 pages and charged him with a key role in the Nazi genocide against European Jewry.
Hoefle, who was stationed in Lublin and War saw in the 1942-43 period, was accused of personally selecting Jews for the gas chambers. As a key assistant to Odilo Globenik, the Nazi governor of Lublin, he also was charged with leading a transport of 8,400 Vienna Jews to Nazi slaughter camps. Another charge was that he also was involved in the deportation of tens of thousands of Warsaw Jews in a six-week period to Treblinka, Sobibor and Maidanek, three of the major Nazi death camps.
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