Quiet Prevails in Landsberg Following Hanging of Seven Top Nazis for Murdering Jews

Quiet prevailed here today following the execution during the night of the seven top Nazi war criminals charged with the mass murder of more than 200,000 persons–most of them Jews–in Poland and the Ukraine during the German occupation.

The seven criminals, who carried out Hitler’s policy of racial extermination, were hanged behind the heavily guarded walls of the Landsberg prison, the place where Hitler wrote much of “Mein Kamf.” All walked to the gallows unaided. Two official photographers took pictures of each condemned man. A half-hour after the last hanging the wives were officially informed. Five of them had made arrangements to claim their husbands’ bodies. The hanged men were.

S.S. Gen. Oswald Pohl, destroyer of the Warsaw Ghetto and chief administrator of the Nazi concentration camp system which annihilated hundreds of thousands of Jews.

S.S. Gen. Otto Ohlendorf, who confessed that extermination units under his command slaughtered 90,000 Jews and others in the Soviet Union.

S.S. Gen. Erich Naumann, whose extermination force wiped out 3,530 Jews and Gypsies on the central Russian front in the loss than a month.

S.S. Col. Worner Braune, who directed the massacre of Jews in the Crimea.

S.S. Col. Paul Blobel, responsible for the massacre of 60,000, including 33,000 Jews, in two days at Kiov in September, 1941.

S.S. Lt. Hans Schmidt, adjutant at Buchenwald when 5,000 victims died monthly in that concentration camp.

S.S. Sgt. Georg Schallermair, roll-call leader at Muchlendorf, a subsidiary of Dachau concentration camp, who personally beat inmates to death.

The seven were the last of 275 doomed by the United States War Crimes Tribunals of 1946-47. Leaders of the West German Republic sought in vain to persuade the American authorities to make another study of the cases. Twice a last-minute stay was obtained by a defense attorney in Washington.