Waldemar Eissfeld, 46, who in his position as “specialist on Jewish questions” at Erfurt Gestapo headquarters supervised the wartime deportation to the Nazi death camps of almost the entire Jewish population of the German province of Thuringia, was sentenced here to two and a half years at hard labor for causing “aggravated deprivation of liberty.” His former subordinate, 44-year-old SS lieutenant and Gestapo commissar Helnrich Lorenz, was acquitted.
Eissfeld will have to serve four months at the most. The presiding judge ruled that not only the time spent in pre-trial custody back in 1952 should be deducted from the sentence, but even the period at the end of the war during which the Gestapo “Jewish specialist” was held in an Allied interment camp for leading Nazis. These two terms amount to 26 months. He can expect to be home by December, due to the practice in German jails of discharging before Christmas those prisoners whose sentence expire shortly thereafter,
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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.
