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Two Gestapo Officers Admit Directing Execution of Lithuanian Jews

May 20, 1958
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Two of ten defendants in the largest war crimes trial before a German court since the war testified here today that they carried out orders to execute Jewish men, women and children from Lithuania with the greatest repugnance and in consonance with orders from above. The ten are all former officers in the Gestapo and the Nazi police.

Both Hans Joachim Boehme, one-time head of the Gestapo office in Tilsit, and Werner Hersmann, S. S. officer, placed responsibility for the murderous order on Dr. H. Stah-lecker, chief of the S.S. The defendants are charged with the murder of nearly 5,200 human beings, many of whom were Lithuanian Jews. The massacre occurred in 1941.

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