Eighteen former members of a Nazi security police unit in Stanislav, Galicia, will go on trial in Muenster in April on charges of wartime murder of thousands of Jews, it was announced this weekend. The indictment charges the 18 former Nazis with the murder of 120, 000 victims in the Stanislav district alone between 1941 and 1943.
Hans Krueger, 56, of Luedinghausen, the principal defendant, served as chief of the unit for more than a year, starting in August, 1941. The indictment charged that, under his command, the Nazi “final solution of the Jewish question” began with the murder of 600 Jewish doctors, lawyers and rabbis. The trial is expected to last several months with 179 survivors from several countries coming to Muenster to testify.
A survivor of the Czestchohowa ghetto broke down this weekend as he described to a Lueneburg war crimes trial court how one of the defendants sent his two children to a Nazi death camp. The witness was Moses Gluecksmann, 65, who testified that Paul Degenhardt, 70, commander of the ghetto in 1942 and 1943, ordered his two children, aged six and 12, sent to the Treblinka death camp where they were murdered.
Two other former members of Degenhardt’s Nazi police unit, Kurt Jericho, 57, and Alfred Loebel, 51, are on trial with Degenhardt. The three are charged with the mass killing of Jews in the ghetto in occupied Poland. Degenhardt is charged with personally murdering or ordering the execution of 496 Jews in the ghetto and with helping to select many thousands of the ghetto’s 50, 000 prisoners for the gas chambers of Treblinka. The witness described Degenhardt as “master of life and death” in the ghetto.
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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.
