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German Court Warns Ex-nazis on Hiding Their Role in Mass Murders

July 26, 1962
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The Hesse administrative court today ruled that a person who concealed from the authorities the fact that he participated in mass exterminations during the Nazi regime, could be deprived of his rights as a civil servant.

The ruling was handed down in the case of a policeman who, as a Gestapo official in Lublin, Poland, during the Second World War, was instrumental in carrying out mass exterminations of the Jewish population. The decision has been communicated to officials in other West German states.

A book accusing Heinz Reinefarth, Mayor of Westerland and a member of the Schleswig-Holstein State Parliament, of wartime crimes in Warsaw and other parts of Poland, was published here today by the Frankfurt Verlag fuer Wehrwesen. The author is Dr. Hans von Krannhals, an authority on German atrocities in the Eastern countries.

Reinefarth is now running for re-election to the Schleswig-Holstein Parliament. Two efforts to try him for war crimes at Flensburg had failed. He is accused of having been a group leader of the SS, a high official in the Nazi police apparatus, and of having helped quash the rebellion of the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943.

A book entitled “Concentration Camp Crimes Before the Courts,” documenting evidence in the trials of a number of convicted prominent former concentration camp leaders, was praised today in the Bulletin of the Government Office of Press and Information. The book had been compiled by Dr. H. G. van Dam, secretary-general of the Central Council of the Jews in Germany, and Ralph Giordano, of Frankfurt.

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