Two Nazi torture-killers have been sentenced for their crimes against concentration camp victims, one to a life term at hard labor, the maximum penalty in Germany, and one to a two-year term.
Otto Locke, a German unskilled laborer whom the Nazis took into custody as a professional criminal and later promoted to the rank of “topkapo” as an inmate supervisor in Auschwitz, received the maximum penalty from the West Berlin Court of Assizes which found him guilty of murdering six Jewish prisoners and one Frenchman.
Reinhold Ortmann, a former Berlin Gestapo official who came to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp from SS headquarters as a member of a five-man commission which tortured to death 27 anti-Nazi political prisoners, was found guilty only of “forcible extortion of testimony while in the exercise of an official function” by the Frankfurt Court of Assizes.
Jerry Rotstein, an Auschwitz survivor who is now a businessman in Denver. Colo., testified that Locke had forced Jewish inmates to dance with naked feet on a red-hot brick oven. The principal witness for the prosecution was Jacques Rosmarin, now a New York real estate broker.
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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.
