The jury court trying three former Nazis for wartime murders of 2,400 Jews in the Rovno area in the Ukraine, heard today a suicide’s testimony that one of the victims appealed to him to spare the Jews from torture before they were murdered.
The testimony was that of former Nazi policeman Fricdrich Attinger, who was on duty in the Sdolbunow Ghetto, and who committed suicide in prison in 1961, apparently while awaiting trial. According to Attinger’s statement, which was read to the court, the chairman of the Jewish Council of the ghetto said to him: “I know that all of us will have to die, but if you are in a position to do so, see to it that we shall not be tortured.”
The three Nazis, Joseph Paur, Wilhelm Wacker and Otto Koeler, are being tried for the slaughter of the Jews in Sdolbunow, Misotsch and Ostrog in October 1942. The trial is taking place in the same court where the Allies held the postwar Nuremberg trials of the major Nazi figures. Testimony heard in the first few days of the trial, which opened last week, apparently was aimed at clarifying for the Jury the question of whose orders the defendants had obeyed in the mass murders.
Another witness, Fritz Lorge, Karlsruhe former police colonel, who is 70, testified that if German police officers in the occupied areas had refused to carry cut execution orders, nothing much would have happened to them. However, he added, the ordinary policemen were afraid of the SS courts and of the Nazi Security Police who in 1942 had been responsible for handling of Jews.
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