A former Nazi officer, who sued a Swedish newspaper for libel but then could not deny in court that its charge was true, was ordered in Stockholm today to pay court and attorneys’ fees totaling more than two and a half times what he sued for. Lobe Karligh, who sought 15,000 crowns ($3125) from the Communist daily Ny Dag, was told to pay 38,000 crowns ($7917) after the court threw the case out.
Karligh, 77, was an SS officer and a member of the Nazi units in Latvia. Angered by Ny Dag’s constant criticism of his presence in Sweden and his Swedish citizenship and its calling him “a murderer,” he went to court to protect his “sullied name.” But he was unable to deny that he had been responsible for the deaths of 2000 Latvian Jews. The witnesses against him included Simon Wiesenthal, director of the Vienna Documentation Center, who flew to Stockholm with appropriate documents.
Another Swedish newspaper, Aftenbladet, charged recently that Dr. Gunnar V. Jarring, ambassador to the Soviet Union and the United Nations’ special Middle East representative, had been associated during his 20s with an organization that later embraced Nazi policy. It has not yet been ascertained, however, whether Dr. Jarring left the unit before or after its ideological shift.
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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.
