Three former Nazis went on trial in Lueneburg today on charges of participating in the wartime murders of several thousand Jews in Czenstochow, in occupied Poland.
The defendants are Paul Degenhardt, 70, former captain of the German security police in the area; Kurt Jericho, 57, now a businessman, and Otto Loebel, 51, a law court guard. They are charged with deportation of many thousands of Jews to the Treblinka murder camp, and with participation in many individual acts of murder of Jews.
Dr. Herbert Zimmerman, a former Nazi police officer accused of the murder of 20, 000 persons, mostly Jews, in Bialystok, eastern Poland, in 1943 and 1944, committed suicide this weekend only a few minutes before he was to have been arrested at his home near Bielefield.
Police said that Zimmerman, a lawyer at Brackwede near Bielefield, shot himself to death just before he was to have been taken into custody pending preparation of his trial on mass murder charges scheduled to open in March. He was commander of the Nazi security forces in Bialystok during World War II.
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