Army officials today admitted that protests are continuing to be received by them from members of the U.S. Congress against the reduction of the life imprisonment sentence of Ilse Koch, wife of the former Hazi commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp who selected prisoners to go to their death in order to make lamp shades of their skins.
The Army officials pointed out that there is no further action legally possible since the recommendation of the War Crimes Board of Review to reduce the sentence from life imprisonment to four years was approved by Gen. Lucius D. Clay. However, a detailed report; is expected in Washington in a few days, they revealed. The reduction of the Koch sentence–which provides for her release in 1949–is severely criticized in an editorial today in the Washington Post.
(The New York Times, in an editorial today, demands that Gen. Clay explain why the sentence was reduced. “One thing the United States cannot afford to do in Germany is to coddle those who were guilty of crimes against mankind under the Nazi regime,” the editorial says.)
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