Franz Stangl, the former commandant of the Treblinka and Sobibor death camps, went on trial here today charged with the murder of more than 400,000 Jews and mentally ill inmates in 1942 and 1943. Forty witnesses from the United States and Israel will testify at the trial which is expected to last until the end of September. Stangl, 62, an SS member since 1931, was extradited from Brazil in 1967. He was traced there through the efforts of Simon Wiesenthal, director of the Nazi war crimes documentation center in Vienna. But the Brazilian government extracted a promise from West Germany that Stangl would not have to serve more than 15 years and that any sentence beyond that limit would be voided by the Bonn government. The Brazilian demand was based on the grounds that Stangl was arrested after Brazil’s statute of limitations went into effect.
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.
