A. Wulf, Chief State Attorney of Frankfort, announced the arrest today of Herman Krumey, a former high ranking leader of the SS, on charges of complicity in the mass slaughter of 88 Czechoslovak children.
Krumey had been arrested in April 1957 on charges of being involved in the 1944 murder of 450,000 Hungarian Jews, when he was an aide to Adolph Eichmann, who was in charge of Gestapo leader Heinrich Himmler’s extermination program. Krumey was reported to have been involved in negotiations with the Jewish underground on Eichmann’s offer to deliver one million Jews in exchange for 10,000 trucks. A district court ordered Krumey’s release on the Hungarian charges.
The accusations which led to the second arrest were made by a Czech resistance group which had learned of the initial arrest and the charges. The Czech group charged that Krumey, as director of a resettlement center in Lodz, turned over to the SS 88 children from Lidice after that Czech village was destroyed by the SS in 1942 in reprisal for the assassination of SS leader Heydrich.
Krumey, who was born in the Sudentenland, was denazified in 1948 and with the aid of special refugee loans, he opened a drugstore in Korbach. He served for a time as deputy of the German Bloc and Refugee party in the district of Waldeck. State Attorney Wulf said that investigation of all charges against Krumey would be accelerated.
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.
