13 Trials of Nazi War Criminals to Be Started Soon in Bavaria

FRANKFURT (JTA)—The Ba-
varian office on prosecution of
war criminals reported that pre-
liminar y investigations were
under way in some 60 cases, that
160 investigations were b e i n g
made in Bavaria against 869 sus-
pects and that an additional 13
war crimes trials will be started
soon by criminal courts in Bavaria.
Two of the three ex-Nazis being
tried here in the second of the
Auschwitz trials, accused of par-
ticipating in the mass murder of
thousands of Jews in the Auschwitz
death camp, pleaded not guilty
Dec. 18.
The first Auschwitz trial, con-
cluded here last August after pro-
ceedings lasting 20 months, had
resulted in the conviction of 16 of
the 20 defendants, six of the men
being given life imprisonment
terms.
The three on trial now are Wil-
helm Burger, 61, charged with
having been the man woh provided
the gas used for murdering Jews
in the Auschwitz gas ovens; Josef
Erber, 68, and Gerhard Neubert,
56.
Burger conceded on the witness
stand that his department at Ausch-
witz had provided gas, but insisted
he did not know the gas was being
used for murdering Jews.
Erber, charged with having been
a "selection officer" at the camp,
denied the accusation and said he
had never taken part in the selec-
tion of Auschwitz prisoners for
death in the gas ovens.
Prof. Jahn Sehn, who attended
the first trial of Auschwitz death
camp personnel here and 'who
came to Frankfurt with evidence
for the second Auschwitz trial,
died in a Frankfurt hotel after a
heart attack.
In Rome, it was reported that
Ehrhard Kroeger, a former SS
officer whose extradition to West
Germany was refused last year
by a Bologna court and who has
been living in Italy since, was
in West Germany.
If that report is accurate, of-
ficials said, Kroeger would be
among the most important wit-
nesses in the scheduled trial of
former Dusseldorf Gestapo chief
Herbert Weygandt, who was ar-
rested two weeks ago in Wuppertal,
living under an assumed name.
Weygandt, 59, faces trial on
charges of giving and signing an
order for the deportation of some
6,000 Jews in North Rhineland-
Westphalia and in the murder of
50,000 Jews in occupied Lodz in
Poland.
Officials said that Kroeger was
accompanied last Monday by
Italian police officers to an ex-
press train leaving Bolzano for
West Germany and that, two hours
later, the train carrying Kroeger
crossed the Austrian-Italian border
at Brenner Pass.
They added that this procedure
pointed to expulsion, rather than
to voluntary departure or extradi-

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tion, as some contradictory press
reports had indicated.
The West German Embassy in
Rome said it had no information
about a renewed extradition re-
quest and the West German Con-
sul in Milan said that the only
request it had received in the
matter was a query from Dussel-
dorf public prosecutors a b o u t
Kroeger's whereabouts.
In Kiel, a sentence of life im-
prisonment was demanded Wed-
nesday by the state prosecutor in
the retrial of Martin Fellenz, a
former SS Lieutenant Colonel
and former Nazi police chief in
Cracow in occupied Poland dur-
ing the war.
Fellenz was sentenced to a four-
year term in his first trial in Flens-
burg in connection with the de-
portation of 38,000 Jews in the
Cracow area. He was released soon
after the start of his term because
the court ordered the period of his
pretrial detention deducted from
his sentence.
The Flensburg prosecutor ap-
pealed against the light sentence,
and the West German High Court
ordered a second trial. New
charges have been made against
Fellenz during the new trial. He
was denied all charges, asserting
that responsibility for actions in
occupied Poland rested with the
Nazi police chief for the entire
area, a statement in conflict with
prosecution evidence that local
Nazi police chiefs had authority to
order deportations.
In Buenos Aires, Federal Judge
Luis Maria Rodriguez approved
West Germany's request for ex-
tradition of Gerhard Johannes
Bernhard Bohne, who was ar-

Berlin Theater Showing
Nazi Film Threatened;
Bombing Vandal in Jail

BERLIN (JTA) — An anony-
mous threat to "blow up with ex-
plosives" the Freie Volkshuehle
Theater unless it removed within
three days an anti-Nazi play it was
showing, was received by the
theater's management in the mail.
The play, "The Investigation," is
based on the proceedings of the
August trial in Frankfurt of 20 of-
ficials and medical personnel of
the Auschwitz concentration camp.
The play was _written by Peter
Weiss and has drawn favorable at-
tention from anti-Nazi Germans.
In Cologne, Erhard Reinhardt,
28, a laborer, and Eckart Bra-
gard, 20, a mechanic, both of
Aachen, were sentenced to prison
*terms of 15 months and six
months, respectively, for send-
ing death threats to West German
pacliamentary members during
the debate last spring on exten-
sion of the West German statute
of limitations deadline for prose-
cution of Nazi war criminals.
The two men were convicted of
sending Belgian neo-Nazi leaflets
containing a threat that those who
voted for the extension would be
"sentenced to death."
In Bamberg, Reinhard Woitzik,
the 20-year-old jobless dental tech-
nician who admitted smearings of
23 tombstones and monuments in
the Bamberg Jewish cemetery last
summer, began Wednesday a term
of 18 to 42 months in the juvenile
detention center.
The youth, who said in his trial,
that he was ashamed of his acts,
was found guilty of desecrating the
cemetery. He said he had develop-
ed a hatred of Jews after spending
his childhood in postwar refugee
camps and seeing his father, a one-
time member of Hitler's SS Elite
Guard, arrested in 1961 on suspi-
cion of war crimes.
East Berlin Commemorates
Plaque for Martyred Jews
WEST BERLIN (JTA) — The
East Berlin municipality was re-
ported today to have affixed a
commemorative plaque to the
Jewish Old Age Home in East
Berlin. The home was dedicated
to the memory of Jews murdered
by the Nazis.

THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS

12—Friday, December 24, 1965

rested in Argentina 21 months ago.
Bohne, 65, is wanted by a Ger-
man court on charges of w a r
crimes specifying that he was in-
volved in the mass murder of
15,000 inmates of hospitals and
mental institutions, including Jews
and non-Jews, in 1939 and 1940.
In Vienna, Robert Jan Ver-
belen, a former SS general con-
demned to death in absentia by
Belgium in 195'7 for wartime
crimes in that country, was
found innocent Tuesday by a
Vienna jury court on charges
of participating in terrorist acts
and mass murders in Belgium.
The jurors said in the decision
that Verbelen had acted in an
"emergency" situation and h a d
"only" fulfilled o r de r s of his
superiors. The state attorney im-
mediately announced he was ap-
pealing the verdict.
Verbelen, who served as a war-
time deputy to Leon Degrelle, the
former- Belgian Rexist lea der
during the German occupation,
fled from Belgium and turned up
in Austria in 1945 acquiring Aus-
trian citizenship. In 1962 the Bel-
gian government asked his extra-
dition. The Austrian government
rejected the request because of
Verbelen's Austrian citizenship.
Later, the government withdrew
that citizenship and Verbelen again
disappeared, returning to Vienna
in 1963 when he was arrested.
Under new Austrian legislation,
the crimes for which he was tried
in absentia are no longer indict-
able and he was therefore indicted
on the new charges of which the
jury court Tuesday acquitted him.
A new trial was granted by the
Austrian Supreme Court last
weekend to Franz Novak, a
former Nazi SS captain, who had
previously been found guilty of
war crimes and sentenced to
eight years' imprisonment. The
court found that the verdict
against the man was "incomplete
and contradictory," but ordered
him held in custody until another
trial is conducted.
Novak, known as "the ferryman
of death, "was convicted in 1964
on charges that, during World War
II, he had arranged for the trans-
port of thousands of Jews to Nazi
concentration camps. The indict-
ment accused him of packing the
victims into cattle cars, where
many of them died en route to the
camps.
In London, a dispatch was re-
ceived from Moscow noting that
Ivan Melnikov, a Russian citizen
accused of participating during
World War II in the murder of
underground fighters, has been
condemned to death by a Soviet
court.
The man pleaded guilty to
having been a member of the Nazi
occupation police force. He fled

1-Day Strike Grounds
Israeli Airline Planes

TEL AVIV (JTA)—All planes of
Arkia, Israel's domestic airline,
were grounded Dec. 16 by a one-
day warning strike of flight crews
demanding wage increases of 30
per cent. El Al pilots also demand-
ed wage boosts of up to 50 per
cent.
The managements of both com-
panies rejected the demands in
compliance with Finance Minister
Pinhas Sapir's ban two weeks ago
on any wage increases for workers
in such companies pending devel-
opment of an over-all wage policy
by the government.

in 1963 when the Soviet army ap-
proached the area in which he was
collaborating with the Nazis but
was caught and arrested recently.
In Bonn, West German of-
ficials were informed by Czecho-
slovakia that it will soon present
a list of former Gestapo officers
now presumed to be living in
West Germany with a formal
request for their extradition to
face war crimes charges.
Czech officials previously indi-
cated that they wanted extradition
of Gestapo officials who had been
on duty in Czechoslovakia during
the German occupation. Prague
officials have now indicated that
they will soon present a list of
names of such former Gestapo
men and mentioned four of them
as heading the list.
The four men are Fraznk Kar-
mazyn, former SS storm troop
leader, Ernest Gerger, Er win
W e i n m a n n and Hans Ulrich
Geschke. The Prague move was
considered here a response to the
recent West German plea to all
countries to provide available data
on Nazi war criminals before the
end of 1966, when the extended
deadline in the statute of limita-
tions on prosecution of such crim_
inals takes effect..
Gerger was said to be respon-
sible for the shooting of Czech
Jews in Bohemia-Moravia during
the G e r ma n occupation. The
charges against the other three
were not indicated.
Six West German student or-
ganizations protested at a press
conference here against the rec-
ord of wartime medical experi-
ments on inmates of the Dachau
concentration camp carried out
by Dr. Siegfried Rulf, now a
professor at the University of
Bonn and head of the Medical
Association in Bad Godesberg.
Prof. Rulf was tried by an Al-
lied military tribunal in Nurem-
berg in 1946. Though he was
acquitted, the court declared there
was considerable suspicion about
his denial that he had killed
Dachau inmates. He admitted he
had assisted in experiments under
orders of Gestapo Chief Heinrich
Himmler.

Desalination in Israel
to Be Studied in D.C.

TEL AVIV (JTA)—Israeli and
American experts will meet in
Washington in February to study
three reports on the joint United
States-Israeli plans for develop-
ing a project in this country for
desalination of seawater.
The announcement was made by
Mekorot Water Company Ltd., the
public utility charged with the de-
velopment of major irrigation pro-
jects and of water supply for all
of Israel. Mekorot is owned joint-
ly by the Israeli government,
' Histadrut, the Jewish Agency and
the Jewish National Fund.
The reports to be discussed in
Washington will deal with the
economic aspects of the plan for
a nuclear plant to be used for de-
salination, the specific problems
regarding atomic development and
the organizational setup of the en-
tire project. To further the final
studies for the project, Mekorot
had allocated 1,500,000 Israeli
pounds ($500,000) for the next fis-

cal year.

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763 French Immigrants
Arrive in Israel in Year

JERUSALEM (JTA)—A total of
763 immigrants from France ar-
rived in Israel during the first
ten months of this year. A Jewish
Agency spokesman said that the
total does not include profes-
sionals, middle class immigrants
and others who came on tem-
porary residence visas and who
were not under the aegis of the
Agency's immigration depart-
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