Two members of the Tilsit Commandos were convicted in Ulm for a second time of mass murders of Jews in Lithuania during 1911. Werner Schmidthammer, 52, was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for the murder of 313 Jews and Tarnas Likys, 60, was sentenced to five years in prison for the murder of 193 victims.
The court ruled that both were fully aware that they were shooting innocent civilian and rejected their claim that the executions were carried out as a military measure. Similar sentences had been imposed on SS leaders in the Tilsit Einsatz Commando trial of August, 1958 when ten SS men were convicted of murder. The Supreme Court ordered a retrial of Schmidthammer and Lukys to determine the exact number of victim.
In Karlsruhe, the West German Federal Supreme Court rejected today an appeal by Wilhelm Schubert, a former guard at the Sachsenhausent concentration camp, who was sentenced by a Bonn court earlier this year to life imprisonment for killing 46 Jewish prisoners. A co-defendant, Gustav Sorge, also sentenced to life imprisonment, had waived his right of appeal.
Rudolf Batz, former commander of the Gestapo, Security Service and Security Police of the Arnsberg district, has been arrested, it was announced today by the Dortmund prosecution office. The former Gestapo chief, who has been living under the name of Rolf Kohl, was charged with the murder of 230 political and Jewish prisoners and forced laborers in Dortmund at the end of the war.
The former commandant of the Gusen concentration camp was charged today with responsibility for the murder of 300 prisoners in the camp during the Second World War The Public Prosecutor’s Office said that the accused, Karl Chmielewski, now 57, had ordered prisoners unfit for work to be sprayed with cold water in the wintertime, until they froze or drowned. In the summer, prisoners who could not work were drowned in an open-air swimming pool.
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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.
