The mass murder trial of Gustav Sorge and Wilhelm Schubert, former Sachsenhausen concentration camp guards, will start October 13, Dr. A Zug, district court prosecutor, announced here today.
In preliminary investigation, the prosecution questioned 315 witnesses and has called 161 additional witnesses, living in Europe, Israel and the United States, for the trial. Dr. Zug said the trial would be deferred only if one of the principle witnesses was unable to appear to testify.
The defendants were accused of the murder of 520 Jews, Social Democrats, Communists, and clergymen. They were also charged with shooting 10,800 prisoners of war. Martin Knittler, who originally was indicted with the two defendants, committed suicide in his cell in July.
The two defendants were sentenced in November 1947 by a Soviet military court to life imprisonment at hard labor for the murder of the Soviet prisoners. They were released from a Siberian prison in January 1956 and returned to West Germany on condition they be tried by a German court.
The bill of indictment charges Sorge with the murder of 100 Jews during the November 1948 pogroms. Schubert was commander of a camp near Riga where Jews were literally “worked to death” building an air base for the German army in 1943.
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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.
