Swiss police and Interpol, the international police organization, were teamed today in a hunt for Hans Waiter Zech-Nenntwich, a convicted Nazi war criminal, who fled last Wednesday from a maximum security prison in West Germany to Switzerland. Speculation was mounting, however, that the former SS cavalry officer and a woman companion, had already fled from Switzerland for a possible hideout in South America.
The Nazi, who was convicted last Monday on charges of complicity in the wartime slaughter of 5, 200 Jews in the Pinsk ghetto in Nazi-occupied Russia, was being held in a Brunswick prison, awaiting the outcome of two appeals of the sentence. One was by his attorney and the other by the prosecutor for a stiffer sentence.
A prison warden, Dietrich Zeemann, was arrested in the escape and admitted he had unlocked six prison doors for the Nazi, who had been a comrade from Nazi labor camp service days. The Nazi was picked up by a waiting car and driven by Herman Gutteck, a former cellmate, to the Klausheide airport where the couple took off for the Basle Mulhouse airport. There they took a train headed for central Switzerland. Brunswick police also arrested Gutteck.
Hesse state officials said it appeared that some kind of a Nazi underground organization was in existence, aiding hunted Nazi criminals to escape justice and that Sech-Nenntwich’s escape might be the latest work of the group.
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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.
