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Nazi Police Captain Sentenced to Life Term for Killing Jews

May 26, 1966
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A former Nazi police captain was sentenced yesterday to life imprisonment for the wartime murder of Jews in the Polish town of Czenstochowa, in one of a number of actions involving Nazi war criminals.

The life term, relatively rare in the hundreds of sentences imposed by West German jury courts in such trials, was passed on Paul Degenhardt, 72, by a Luneburg court. He was found guilty on 28 counts of having shot 71 Jews in 1942 and 1943. Additional charges of killing more than 400 other victims were not tried on grounds that there was no way to punish the former Nazi beyond a life sentence.

In another trial, one which involved 14 former Gestapo members accused of murdering 20,000 Jews in New Sandek, in Poland, a Bochum jury returned today from a visit to the site of the Auschwitz death camp.

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