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Nazi Woman Who Doomed 3,000 Camp Inmates Freed from Jail

March 9, 1954
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Margarete Babe, a German concentration camp overseer sentenced to 21 years in jail in 1948 for maltreating women prisoners and for selecting 3,000 of them for the gas chambers, has been released from the war crimes prison at Werl, upon recommendation of the British-German Clemency Board.

In Deggendorf, a 51-year-old German named Samuel Kuhnke was given eight years of penal servitude, less two years of pre-trial custody. He was charged with having caused the death of 17 fellow-inmates in a concentration camp by denouncing them to the Gestapo and then participating in their interrogation.

Kuhnke, who volunteered for the position of Senior Camp Trusty, was found guilty of having been “an accomplice to manslaughter” in the 17 cases. He had already appeared before the same court on identical charges in 1952, but the proceedings were then broken off because Kuhnke claimed that a large number of former inmates would give evidence on his behalf.

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