Six former Nazis went on trial here on charges of participating in multiple wartime murders of Jews and sick persons in Tarschtsha, in occupied Ukraine.
The defendants were members of Einsatz Commando unit number 5, one of the special squads which followed in the wake of Hitler’s advancing armies with the assignment of wiping out all actual or potential resistance in conquered territories by killing Jews, partisans and other “undesirable elements.”
The defendants are Karl Jung, 53, former Chief Criminal Commissar; Guido Horst Huhn, Dusseldorf, 55; Christian Sterling, 61, Kurt Syplie of Berlin, 56, Fritz Sievert, Lubeck, 51, and Oskar Jeger, 63, a factory worker.
Jung was accused of giving orders for the shootings as a leader of a section of the unit in Tarschtsha. Huhn, who succeeded Jung in 1941 as head of the unit section, was charged with participation in the liquidation of the Tarschtsha. Jewish population Huhn was accused of shooting at least 200 men, women and children in the neck. Sterling and Syplie were charged with being members of the firing squad. Sievert was accused of organizing the murder action.
The indictment charged that 15 members of the commando unit took 25 patients from a hospital near Kiev in 1941 and shot them. Jeger was charged with killing two or three of the patients in that atrocity.
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.
