Suspected Nazi war criminal Josef Schwammberger will be extradited to West Germany shortly to stand trial, Argentine officials promised the prosecutor’s office in Stuttgart on Saturday.
They said their country gave high priority to West Germany’s extradition request and that legal means appear to have been found to deprive Schwammberger of the Argentine citizenship he acquired nearly 40 years ago.
Schwammberger, 75, is believed to have been directly involved in the killings of at least 1,000 Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1942 and 1943. Documentary evidence was brought to Argentina by a representative of the federal prosecutor’s office on Nov. 26.
Schwammberger was arrested in Cordoba province in October, on the basis of information supplied by the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center and other sources. He is presently being held in prison in La Plata.
The Argentine minister of justice, Enrique Paixao, ordered an investigation in November of charges that Schwammberger lied about his Nazi past when he applied for an Argentine passport in 1950. That would be grounds to rescind his citizenship.
Schwammberger was arrested in Austria in 1945. But he escaped to South America in 1948 and entered Argentina two years later under his own name. He was employed by a German company, Siemens.
A warrant for his arrest was issued in 1973 by a court in Stuttgart. It still stands, and he is expected to go on trial there for killings and atrocities in the ghettos and slave labor camps of Przemsyl, Rozwadow, Stalowa-Woda and the concentration camp in Mielce.
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.
