One of the longest war crimes trials on record ended in Hamburg Thursday where a court acquitted a former concentration camp commandant and five former guards of charges of complicity in the mass murders of Jews during World War II. The prosecution had demanded life imprisonment for 72-year-old Karl Streibel, who commanded the Trauniki camp in Poland and was accused of direct or indirect responsibility for the deaths of over one million Jews there and at the Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec camps in 1942-43. But Judge Joachim Seefeld said insufficient evidence had been produced to convict Streibel and his five co-defendants. The trial had lasted three-and-a-half years during which the court travelled to the United States, Israel, Holland, Austria and Britain to question some 200 witnesses including concentration camp survivors.
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