The trial opened today of five Austrians charged with murder or complicity in the murder of Jews in Poland while serving in the Nazi occupation police during World War II. The prosecution was expected to call 50 witnesses from the United States, Israel, Australia, Poland and West Germany. The crimes were allegedly committed in the towns of Kielce, Opatow, Busko, Zdroj and Jedrzejow.
The defendants are Gerulf Mayer, 59, a gendarmery major; Alfred Lusser, 57, a senior gendarmery official and Karl Popp, 55, a senior sergeant in the Austrian Army, who are charged with murder; and Karl Macher, 57, an insurance clerk, and Georg Unterberger, a retired policeman, who are charged with complicity in murder.
Franz Novak, a former SS officer and wartime aide to Adolf Eichmann, will go on trial for the third time in Vienna next May on charges of conspiring to murder 400,000 Jews at Auschwitz concentration camp. Previous verdicts against Novak were overturned.
(Nine former guards at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp who are serving previous sentences for complicity in murder were brought to trial anew by a Cologne court today on the basis of fresh evidence. The main defendant is former SS sergeant Otto Kaiser, 56, who received a 15-year term in 1965.)
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