Sixty-two year-old Franz Rademacher, a former aide to the notorious Adolf Eichmann, was sentenced to five years in prison at hard labor by a Bamberg court after being convicted of participating in the murder of at least 1,300 Serbian Jews in 1941 and organizing the deportation of some 2,000 Rumanian Jews from France in 1942. But Rademacher’s sentence was temporarily suspended for reasons of health and his attorney will enter an appeal.
The prosecution had asked for a 15-year prison term for the defendant who was head of the section for Jewish affairs in the Nazi foreign office from 1938 to 1943. During that time, he made a number of trips to Belgrade to assist Eichmann in organizing the deportation of Jews to concentration camps, in 1942, he did the same in France where Jews who fled Rumania were rounded up for deportation. Today’s sentence was the second to be pronounced on Rademacher. The first was in 1952 when he fled the country. He was found and arrested in 1966.
The West German Supreme Court has ordered a retrial of 65-year-old Hans-Joachim Rehse, a former Nazi judge who was sentenced to five years at hard labor last year for abetting murder in passing illegal death sentences under the Nazi regime. The new trial will determine whether former Nazi judges who passed death sentences in Nazi courts can legally be tried for murder.
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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.
