West German television focused last night on the retrial of two former aides of Adolf Eichmann whose hearing in Frankfurt opened yesterday. Meanwhile in Stuttgart, a 63-year-old former SS Corporal, Edgar Enge, walked out of court a free man although a jury had found him guilty of aiding in the mass murder of nearly 6,000 Yugoslavian Jews near Belgrade during World War II.
Going on trial for the second time in Frankfurt were former SS Capt. Otto Hunsche, 56, and former SS Col. Hermann Krumey, 63, who are charged with complicity in the massacre of 300,000 Hungarian Jews during World War II. The case has aroused particular interest because Hunsche was acquitted in his previous trial for lack of evidence. Krumey was found guilty and sentenced to five years imprisonment. But both the acquittal and the sentence were quashed and a new trial was ordered. According to a TV program giving the background of the case, Hunsche was Eichmann’s legal expert. He is alleged to have held talks in Budapest with representatives of the Jewish Council while elsewhere in Hungary, Jews were being deported to extermination camps. The purpose of the talks, the TV commentator said, was to give the Jews false hopes that they might survive and thereby prevent them from taking steps to escape.
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