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Nazi Envoy Who Deported Jews from Bulgaria Released in Germany

November 4, 1959
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Dr. Fritz Bauer, prosecutor-general of Hesse, filed an appeal today against a Frankfurt court order releasing Adolf Heinz Beckerle, Hitler’s ambassador to Bulgaria, who had been arrested on charges of complicity in the murder of 11,343 Macedonian and Thracian Jews. The victims were deported in March 1943 to the Treblinka extermination camp.

The lower court ruled that when Beckerle in 1942 applied pressure to a resistance Bulgarian Government to deport the Jews, he “probably” did not know about the Nazi intention to exterminate them.

Dr. Bauer, in announcing plans to appeal, said that “we have enough evidence to show that Beckerle read the protocols of the ‘Wannsee Conference’ in January 1942 when Nazi leaders planned steps for the ‘final solution'” of the Jewish problem.

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