The retrial of former Nazi court Judge Heinz-Hugo Hoffmann, 66, began in Nuremberg this week. Hoffmann, accused of murdering former Nuremberg Jewish community chairman Leo Katzenbach, was assistant to Nazi Judge Oswald Rothaug at Katzenbach’s trial in 1942 in Nuremberg. Katzenbach was tried for having had intimate relations with a 32-year-old “Aryan,” Irene Soller. He was sentenced to death and hanged in Munich on June 3, 1942. In 1968, Hoffmann was tried for manslaughter and sentenced to two-year’s imprisonment. The federal criminal court in Karslruhe later quashed the sentence, however, and ordered a retrial.
Israel’s Labor Party has re-instated its plans to send a delegation to West Germany this spring. The plans were frozen in the aftermath of the Munich slayings of Israeli Olympic athletes last Sept. and the subsequent release of three Arab terrorists as ransom for a hijacked Lufthansa jet. The Labor Party announced that the party’s general secretary Aharon Yadlin, would head the delegation which will be the guests of the West German Social-Democratic Party.
Gideon Rafael, a senior advisor in the Israel Foreign Ministry, will be named Ambassador to Britain at the end of the year, succeeding Michael Comay, it was reported in Jerusalem:’
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
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.