Professor Rudolf Schiedermair, who was recently suspended from the post of president of the Bavarian Administrative Court here, was officially charged today with aiding in the “final solution of the Jewish problem.”
He was suspended on charges of having participated in Nazi terror judgments in special wartime courts in occupied Norway. He was sentenced in Norway in 1949 to two years’ imprisonment for participation in verdicts that resulted in death sentences for relatively minor offenses.
The formal charge against him, announced today by the Wuerzburg chief public prosecutor’s office, was based on suspicion that he had prevented Jews in Bohemia and Moravia from leaving, and thus becoming targets of the anti-Jewish program of Adolf Eichmann, who was convicted and hanged in Jerusalem for directing the deportations of millions of Jews to death camps in occupied Europe.
A few weeks ago, the East German public prosecutor’s office had offered the Bavarian Interior Ministry a June 1939 document allegedly proving the charges against Dr. Schiedermair, which was rejected on grounds that the offer was part of a continuing East German propaganda effort to embarrass West Germany on the issue. The Wuerzburg Chief Public Prosecutor has now requested that document, explaining that apparently new evidence has turned up in the case.
When the Norway charges were aired last September, the West German Interior Ministry said that Dr. Schiedermair did not indicate when he joined the West German judiciary, that he had been an SS officer and that he had worked in the Nazi party central office where plans had been drafted for the “final solution of the Jewish question” in Bohemia and Moravia.
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