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Archive for the ‘Nazi News Stories’ Category
US deports SS ‘murder pits guard’
The US has deported to Austria a former SS man it says was involved in the Nazi killing of some 8,000 Jews, shot in a single day and buried in pits.
Josias Kumpf, 83, immigrated from Austria in 1956, settling in Wisconsin and becoming a US citizen in 1964.
The US justice department sued to strip him of his citizenship in 2003.
Confirming the deportation, Vienna said he could not be prosecuted in Austria because the statute of limitations had expired in 1965.
“We repeatedly indicated it to the United States,” justice ministry spokeswoman Katharina Swoboda told AFP news agency.
“Our hands are tied.”
‘Orders to shoot’
Mr Kumf was found to have served as a guard at Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany and Trawniki in Poland, where the mass shooting took place in 1943.
“Josias Kumpf, by his own admission, stood guard with orders to shoot any surviving prisoners who attempted to escape an SS massacre that left thousands of Jews dead,” said acting US Assistant Attorney General Rita Glavin.
His assignment had been to watch for victims who were still “halfway alive” or “convulsing” and prevent their escape, the US justice department said.
Josias Kumpf, born in Serbia, joined the SS Death’s Head guard forces at Sachsenhausen in 1942 and served there for about a year before transferring to Trawniki, it added.
He also served at slave labour sites in Nazi-occupied France where prisoners built launching platforms for Germany’s V-1 and V-2 rockets, the justice department said.
There was no immediate comment from Mr Kumpf or his lawyer, Peter Rogers. They have in the past denied that Mr Kumpf had a role in any atrocities.
Nazi camp doctor ‘died in 1992′
Aribert Heim, one of the most wanted Nazi criminals, has been dead since 1992, German’s ZDF television reports.
It says Heim, known as “Doctor Death” lived under a pseudonym and died in Egypt’s capital, Cairo.
ZDF says it found Heim’s passport and other personal documents in a hotel where he lived.
Heim was a concentration camp doctor and was accused of killing hundreds of concentration camp victims, using horrific medical experiments.
In its report, ZDF quoted witnesses, including Heim’s son, as confirming that he died in 1992.
The German TV channel also said Heim had converted to Islam.
Leading Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff from the Simon Wiesenthal Centre said he had not seen the documents found by ZDF.
But he added that if confirmed, the news would be “earth shattering”, the Associated Press reports.
Heim was one of the last major Nazi fugitives believed to be still at large.
He is accused of carrying out horrible medical experiments on prisoners of the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria during World War II.
After the war he lived in West Germany, working as a doctor.
He disappeared in 1962 when police opened an investigation into his past.
Germans seek ‘Nazi guard’ charges
German investigators have said they have enough evidence for charges to be brought against an alleged Nazi death camp guard who now lives in the US.
They said they had obtained new files that would prove John Demjanjuk, 88, was responsible for the death of 29,000 Jews at a camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.
They said they would now ask German prosecutors to request his extradition.
Mr Demjanjuk was sentenced to death in Israel in the 1980s, but was then acquitted and returned to the US.
Born Ivan Demjanjuk in Ukraine, he had migrated to the US in the 1950s. He denies any involvement in Nazi crimes.
‘No doubt’
The file on Mr Demjanjuk was compiled by the special German office investigating Nazi crimes.
Kurt Schrimm, who heads the office, told Reuters that investigators “have managed to obtain hundred of documents and have also found a number of witnesses who spoke out against Demjanjuk”.
“For the first time we have even found lists of names of the people who Demjanjuk personally led into the gas chambers. We have no doubt that he is responsible for the death of over 29,000 Jews” at the Nazis’ Sobibor death camp, he said.
Mr Schrimm added that the investigators’ report had already been submitted to prosecutors in Munich – where Mr Demjanjuk lived briefly after the war – to press for his extradition.
Mr Demjanjuk has always insisted he was a prisoner of war of the Nazis, rather than a guard serving under them.
Mr Demjanjuk emigrated to the US in 1952.
In 1986, he was extradited to Israel and sentenced to death for war crimes, after being identified by witnesses as “Ivan the Terrible”, a notorious prison guard at the Treblinka camp.
But the Israeli Supreme Court overturned his conviction, when new evidence emerged suggesting he was not the same guard.
He returned to the US but was accused of lying on his immigration application about working for the Nazis.
In 2002, a US immigration judge ruled that there was enough evidence to prove Mr Demjanjuk had been a guard at several Nazi death camps and stripped him of his citizenship.
Earlier this year, the retired Ohio car worker lost his legal fight to stay in the US.
German tried over Nazi war crime
A former German infantry commander has gone on trial in Munich for a Nazi war crime, in what is expected to be one of the last cases of its kind.
Josef Scheungraber, 90, is accused of ordering the killing of 14 civilians in a Tuscan village in 1944.
He has previously been sentenced in absentia by an Italian military court to life in prison.
Scheungraber “completely and thoroughly denies the accusations in the charge sheet” said his lawyer.
Outside the courtroom, dozens of demonstrators held banners calling for Scheungraber to be put behind bars.
Some have been outraged that he has only been put on trial now.
He has lived for decades as a free man, and served on the town council in Ottobrunn, outside Munich.
He ran a furniture shop, attended German veterans’ marches and recently received an award for municipal service.
Retaliation
Scheungraber wore a traditional Bavarian suit to the proceedings, which he followed through a hearing aid.
The court has determined that, despite his age, he is fit to be tried, though he will be allowed regular breaks.
The court heard how events unfolded 26 June, 1944.
German troops are alleged to have shot dead a 74-year-old woman and three men in the street before forcing 11 others into a farmhouse which they then blew up. A 15-year-old boy survived the attack with serious injuries.
The massacre was allegedly in retaliation for an attack by Italian partisans that left two German soldiers dead.
Scheungraber said in his statement that he had not given an order for the killings and was not at the scene of the crime.
This story was reproduced from BBC News >>
‘Nazi guard’ loses last US appeal
A man accused of being a guard at a Nazi death camp during World War II has finally lost his legal fight to stay in the United States.
John Demjanjuk, 88, migrated to the US in the 1950s. He was extradited to Israel and sentenced to death for war crimes, but the ruling was overturned.
He returned to the US but was accused of lying on Read more...
Pole who saved ghetto Jews dies
The death of a Polish woman who almost certainly saved the lives of 2,500 Jewish children during World War II has been announced.
Irena Sendlerowa organised the rescue of the children from the Warsaw Ghetto during the Nazi occupation.
She died in a Warsaw hospital at the age of 98, her daughter said.
After Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, she took great risks to help Polish Jews held by the Nazis – an act that was punishable by death.
In 1942 Irena Sendlerowa joined the Zegota resistance movement.
With the rest of her team of 20, she rescued the children between 1940 and 1943, when the Nazis burned the ghetto, condemning its residents to death.
Saved from execution
In October 1943 she was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo, but refused to give up the names of the children.
She was saved on the day of her scheduled execution after the Polish underground bribed her SS guards.
She said persuading parents to part with their loved ones was particularly traumatic.
The children were smuggled out in different ways – in ambulances, through the sewers, and once under her skirt.
The BBC’s Adam Easton in Warsaw says Irena Sendlerowa hated the term “hero”, and said her conscience was troubled because she had done so little.
Last year the Polish parliament unanimously passed a resolution honouring her for organising the “rescue of the most defenceless victims of the Nazi ideology: the Jewish children”.
In recognition of her efforts she has also been awarded the title Righteous Among the Nations, by Israel.
Hitler plot survivor dies aged 90
The last known survivor of a group of German army officers who tried to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944 has died aged 90, his family says.
Philipp von Boeselager provided the explosives used to pack a briefcase planted under a table in the Nazi leader’s East Prussia headquarters.
But the briefcase was moved behind one of the oak table’s wooden legs, and Hitler escaped with only slight wounds.
Most of the plotters were executed, but Mr Von Boeselager escaped detection.
Among those executed – just hours after the assassination attempt – was Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, who planted the briefcase and after whom the plot was named.
Mr Von Boeselager died overnight on Thursday, his family said.
Austria remembers Nazi annexation
A joint session of parliament has been held in Austria to mark its annexation by Nazi Germany 70 years ago.
On 12 March 1938, German troops marched into Austria and Hitler declared “Anschluss”, or political union.
Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer told the sitting that “no compensation can ever diminish the wrong that the Nazis did to our Jewish fellow citizens”.
Later, 80,000 candles will be lit outside parliament, where Austrians cheered Hitler’s arrival 70 years ago.
The candles represent the number of Austrian Jews and others who died at the hands of the Nazis.
The organisers have dubbed the ceremony “The Night of Silence” in contrast with the enthusiasm of the welcome given to the German takeover.
Mr Gusenbauer also announced that the government would build a Simon Wiesenthal Centre in honour of the Nazi hunter who died in 2005.
He told parliament that no pay-off could undo what had been done.
“I can only humbly beg survivors and their relatives to accept this gesture for what it is: a trifling acknowledgement of the injustice that was done to you,” he said.
On Tuesday, Vienna’s Jewish community formally re-opened the Hakoah sports club complex which had been confiscated by the Nazis in 1938.
The previous day, Mr Gusenbauer opened an exhibition showing how Jewish staff of the State Opera were purged under Nazi rule.
The anniversary of the Anschluss has revived debate among Austrians about whether they were victims or supporters of the Third Reich.
Otto von Habsburg, 95, the son of Austria’s last emperor, told a commemorative meeting that no state in Europe had “a greater right than Austria to call itself a victim”.
But the president of the lower house of parliament, Barbara Prammer, told Wednesday’s session that Austrians were complicit in Nazi crimes.
She said any suggestion that they had been forced to commit atrocities was a “fiction of history”.
Nazi-era singer returns to stage
A 104-year-old Dutch cabaret singer who once performed in Nazi Germany has given a concert in the Netherlands for the first time in four decades.
There were protests and tight security around the theatre in Amersfoort where Johannes Heesters appeared.
Although Heesters insists he never espoused Nazi politics, he performed for Adolf Hitler and visited the Dachau concentration camp.
Correspondents say many Dutch people have never forgiven him.
“He kept singing for the Nazi regime, for the Wehrmacht, and he earned millions,” said Piet Schouten, representative of a committee formed to protest against Saturday’s performance.
“We have a problem with that on behalf of all the victims,” he told national broadcaster NOS.
Johannes Heesters, born Johan, began his career in Amsterdam in the 1920s and moved to Germany in 1935, where he enjoyed a successful career.
Heesters was never accused of being a Nazi propagandist, and the Allies allowed him to continue performing after the war.
He was booed off the stage in Amsterdam when he previously tried to stage a comeback in the early 1960s.
Since then he has performed in other countries, notably Germany and Austria.
Canada sends ex-SS guard to Italy
An 83-year-old former Nazi prison camp guard has been transferred to Italy to serve a life sentence for murder.
Michael Seifert arrived in Rome from Canada where he had been fighting a battle against extradition.
An Italian military tribunal convicted him in absentia in 2000 of 11 murders at a prison camp in the northern city of Bolzano.
Seifert admits to having been a guard at the camp but denies being involved in atrocities.
Seifert arrived shortly before dawn from Toronto on a military jet.
The military prosecutor behind the case, Bartolomeo Constantini, described him as “a little wobbly” after leaving the plane. Mr Constantini says Seifert has a pacemaker but is generally healthy.
Seifert was taken to a prison near Naples and was to undergo a medical examination. He may serve the sentence under house arrest because of his age.
The Verona-based military tribunal that convicted him heard testimony that Seifert committed acts of brutality while an SS guard.
Witnesses accused him of leaving a prisoner to starve to death, raping and killing a pregnant woman and gouging an inmate’s eyes out.
Towards the end of World War II, the Bolzano camp was used to house Jews, resistance fighters and German army deserters who were being transported further north.
Seifert was born in Ukraine and went on to work as a Nazi guard after the German occupation. After the war, he concealed his past and entered Canada in 1951.
In 2002, he was arrested after a request from Italy. His attempts to resist extradition reached a dead end in Canada’s Supreme Court last month when it refused to hear his appeal.
His lawyers argued that he had been convicted unfairly in Italy. They also accused the Canadian authorities of bias.
Seifert’s extradition has been welcomed by groups campaigning for Nazi war criminals to be brought to justice.
Avi Benlolo, of the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies in Canada, said it was critical that Seifert faced justice in Italy.
“It sets an example for other war criminals, not only Nazi war criminals, but war criminals related to Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur or any other genocide,” he said.
Various Stuff
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