A lawyer for a former Auschwitz SS doctor being tried in absentia in Paris for praising the Nazis’ extermination of Gypsies asked the court on Tuesday to order a psychiatric examination of his client. The lawyer produced a certificate from a Munich psychiatrist saying the 88-year-old defendant, Hans Muench, suffered from “mental deterioration and memory problems.” Mu???nch, who was not present in court, is being tried for saying in an interview last year that gassing Gypsies to death was “the only way to handle them.”
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