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Nazi Leader Who Deported 50,000 Berlin Jews Arrested in Germany

March 14, 1967
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Otto Bovensiepen, 61, whom a Danish court sentenced to death in 1951 for his war crimes in that country during the German occupation, was arrested at Muelheim, West Germany, today, and turned over to the West Berlin authorities for trial on charges that he had given the orders for the deportation of 50,000 Berlin Jews to death camps.

Bovensiepen headed the Gestapo office in Berlin from 1941 to 1943. Later he was transferred to Denmark. The latter country released him in 1953, after his death sentence had been commuted to life imprisonment. He has been living in Germany since his return in 1953.

At Bremen, the prosecution in the trial of former SS officer Philip Messinger, accused on eight counts of murdering Jews during World War II, requested that the man be given a life sentence at hard labor. The court ruled that it would deliver the verdict in his case tomorrow.

At Dermotent, the local prosecutor announced he has obtained indictments against 10 former SS men, charged with the killing of 34,000 Jews in the Kiev ravine of Babi Yar, during Germany’s occupation of the Ukrainian capital in 1941. The men were accused of being members of Special Commando Unit 4-A, responsible for the killing of a total of 80,000 persons during Germany’s occupation of portions of the Soviet Union.

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