The former chief of the “Jewish Department” of Tarnopol, in Galicia, under the Nazi regime, went on trial here today for the murder of 10,000 Jews in the Lublin and Tarnopol districts in 1942 and 1943. The area was then Polish territory.
The defendant is Friedrich Lex, 63. According to the indictment, he personally murdered a number of Jews, and ordered the transport of many thousands of others to the Belzec death camp. Between April 1942 and June 1943, 43,400 Galician Jews were murdered by the Nazis, of whom 40,000 were from the Tarnopol district.
As the trial opened today, Lex admitted to the court that he was present during mass shootings of Jews, but denied he had engaged “in personal activity” in those occurrences. The prosecutor told the court he expects to call 22 witnesses, including 12 from Israel. Only 30 persons were in the court room’s visitors’ gallery when the trial opened this morning.
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.
