The two 25-year-old youths whose Christmas Eve smearing of the Cologne synagogue touched off a worldwide wave of anti-Semitic daubings were sentenced yesterday to prison terms and loss of their civil rights.
Arnold Strunk was sentenced to 14 months in prison. Paul Schoenen was sentenced to 10 months. Judge Hans Metse ordered them deprived of their civil rights for two years. He ruled that the accidence showed a Nazi ideological influence in the behavior of the defendants, but that their actions were not part of an organised anti-Semitic program.
The prosecutor, Friedrich Maler-Bode, had asked for a jail term of two years and three months for Strunk, a baker’s lielper, and 24 months for Schoenen, son of a well-to-do family who worked in his father’s office supply business. Shoenen’s grandfather was half-Jewish.
The trial was covered by more than 170 German and foreign correspondents. The defendants, who were expelled from the right-wing German Reichs Party after their arrest, said that they were adherents of such pro-Nazi groups as Mathilds Ludendor’s "Teutonic Circle." They were tried on charges of libel and blasphemy, defiling a house of worship and with "unconstitutional intent." They could have received maximum total terms of 15 years each.
Both men acted defiantly during the trial, neither showing any remorse for their acts. Schoenen told the court, in a closing speech after the testimony had been presented, that the felt he may go down in German history as a "nationalist hero." Strunk said he defaced the synagogue to draw attention to the "Jewish danger to the German race."
A medical export testified that both men are "psychopathic scatterbrains, with no intelligence rating, and an animal-like fanaticism."
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.
