Former Police Lieutenant Ernst Burmeister, who was in charge of a special Nazi detachment which gassed many thousands of Jews in the Chelmno concentration camp in Poland during World War II, said today at the mass murder trial of 13 storm troopers and security police that he had been accustomed all his life to receive and carry out orders.
He made the statement in interrogation in the trial in which the defendants are charged with the murder of 180, 000 Jews in the Polish death camp. He said that, as a civil servant all his life, he had been “brought up in the Prussian way of life” to do as he was ordered.
Four leaders of a neo-Nazi movement in West Berlin were given prison terms today ranging from four to nine months, for spreading ideas against “democratic order.” Two others were sentenced to one-month terms in a youth detention home, after they were convicted on the same charges.
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.
