A total of 686 war crimes cases, many of them involving several times that number of suspects, are still being probed by the Central Agency for the Investigation of Nazi War Crimes, it was announced here today by Dr. Adalbert Ruckeri, the new head of the agency, which is located at Ludwigsburg, near Stuttgart.
He said the recent scanning of archives on the Nazi era by some of his investigators, who had been given access to documentation in Prague and Warsaw, had resulted in the uncovering of more than 300 new cases. The recent Soviet Government announcement that it would allow West German probers to examine its records in Moscow is expected to produce still more cases, Dr. Ruckeri said.
Ilse Koch, “the beast of Buchenwald,” who had been serving a life sentence at a prison at Aichach, Upper Bavaria, committed suicide there this weekend, according to an announcement by the Bavarian Ministry of Justice. Convicted for, among other crimes, making lamp shades out of the skins of Jewish martyrs at the Buchenwald concentration camp, she was 60. She had been found dead, hanging from a noose made of bedsheets attached to the bars of her prison cell.
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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.