A Hamburg court has sentenced a former SS officer to life imprisonment at hard labor for the murder of Jews in Poland in 1942 and 1943. Wilhelm Rosenbaum, 53, was found guilty of ordering mass executions of 159 Jews in the Cracow district and of having himself shot at least 10 persons, including children. The prosecution alleged that Rosenbaum ordered the shootings and hangings of Jews as his own “private affair” and not on the orders of superiors.
A Nazi convicted of complicity in the mass murder of over 30,000 Greek and Bulgarian Jews during World War II was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment at hard labor by a Frankfurt court at the conclusion of a 10-month trial. The defendant, Fritz Gerhard Von Hahn, was convicted along with Adolf Beckerle on two counts of mass murder. The prosecution had demanded a life sentence.
A Munich district court announced that it has dropped charges against the right-wing neo-Nazi newspaper Deutsche National and Soldaten Zeitung for publishing a picture of Adolf Hitler on July 20, 1967 in violation of the law prohibiting the public display of Nazi symbols. The court said the case fell under an amnesty granted in connection with a new, less stringent law against political offenses. The picture of Hitler was juxtaposed with one of Israel’s Defense Minister, Gen. Moshe Dayan, under the headline, “Israel’s Auschwitz in the Desert, The Mass Murder of the Arabs: Dayan in Hitler’s Footsteps.”
A member of the West German Parliament denied a charge by the Soviet Army paper, Red Star, that membership in the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party had increased in the West German Army in the past year. In his answer to the Soviet charge, Social Democrat Deputy Hans Iven said that such memberships had not increased in either of the past two years. The Red Star had claimed that NPD members in the West German Army had increased from 700 to 900.
Plans were disclosed in Paris for a West German one-hour television film on the problems of European Jewish communities, which will be shown in West Germany next October. The television staff, directed by Paul Mautner, will start shooting in France at the end of August.
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.
