Martin Sommer, the Nazi “killer of Buchenwald,” went on trial at Bayreuth yesterday charged specifically with the murder of 53 Jewish inmates of the death camp.
For the past eight years Sommer has avoided standing trial, pleading ill health. In the original indictment against the former S. S. guard, the prosecution charged that between 1938 and 1943 Sommer killed numerous numbers of prisoners by injecting poison or air embolisms into their veins.
In Hamburg, Erich Dittrich went on trial today charged with complicity in the murder of 13 Jewish slave laborers at a mill he owned. The prosecution charges that in 1942 he selected 30 of his Jewish workers to be shot by Nazi police. Intervention of the factory foreman saved 17 of the victims.
(Twenty-one Nazi war criminals still remaining in Danish prisons will be released this year or next, the Danish Ministry of Justice announced today in Copenhagen. The majority of the Nazis had originally been condemned to death but their sentences were committed to life imprisonment. Their release will come after reviews, now pending, by the Ministry and the courts.)
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