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Long sentences meted out to 3 Nazis for war crimes
Jerusalem Post Febuary 12, 1980 COLOGNE, West Germany. — French Jews applauded yesterday as a Cologne court sentenced three former Nazis to long jail terms for deporting 73,000 French Jews to the Auschwitz death camp. A 12-year term went to Herbert-Martin Hagen, 66, who had been personal assistant to the SS police chief in France and head of a department in the Paris Gestapo. Kurt Lischka, 70, one-time Gestapo chief in Paris, and Ernst Heinrichsohn, 59, who worked in the Gestapo's Jewish affairs department in Paris, were jailed for 10 and six years respectively. After passing sentence, Judge Heinz Fassbender said in a two-hour statement all three must have realized that death faced many of the 73,000 men, women and children whose deportation the accused had helped to organize. The prosecution had demanded sentences of It years each for Lischka and Hagen and five years for Heinrichsohn. Passbender said the court gave Lischka a milder sentence because he was not In charge of Jewish deportation and markedly anti-Semitic. But the judge attacked Hagcn as an "anti-Jewish racist" who In the language of the Third Reich "always supported a radical solution of the Jewish problem." Serge Klarsfeld, the French Jewish lawyer whose long years of research helped bring the trial about, afterwards pronounced himself "satisfied" with the sentences; although Helnrtchsohn's was too mild In his view. Klarsfeld's wife Beate, whose spectacular attempt to kidnap Lischka In 1971 brought publicity to the case, smiled and embraced French Jews who travelled to Cologne to hear the verdict. As a man who spread Nazi propaganda, Fassbender said, Hagen was at least partly responsible for the indoctrination and deeds in 1942 of the then 22-year-old Heinrichsohn. Despite his youth and Junior post, Fassbender said, Heinrichsohn certainly knew of the misery of Jews in Drancy and other French camps he emptied to fill the trains rumbling to Auschwitz. "You saw children starving, badly clothed and forcibly separated from their parents. Even a 22-year-old man can see that." Heinrichsohn's attempts throughout the three-and-a-half month trial to gloss over this with "half-truths and untruths" were one reason for the increase in his sentence. Heinrichsohn, who immediately resigned his post as mayor of the Bavarian town of Buergstadt, turned away and buried his face in his hands as the judge addressed him. The three former Nazis were earlier tried and sentenced in absentia by French courts, who handed Lischka a death sentence in 1951. Although they later surfaced at home, the three were not extradited to serve the sentences, as West Germany does not extradite its citizens. After a change in the law to allow retrial of cases handled abroad, they were brought to court in Cologne last summer. Lischka, Hagen and Heinrichsohn walked out of the court after the verdict, pending possible appeal. French Jews, many wearing yellow, wartime-style badges saying "Jew from France," said they thought their involvement in the trial had helped speed up the proceedings, which began in October. In contrast, another war crimes trial concerned with Nazi killings at Maidanek death camp in eastern Poland is still going on in nearby Duesseldorf after more than four years. The trial, which is likely to be one of the last major war crimes hearings in West Germany, had been punctuated by Jewish protests, which erupted into violence at the opening session in October. The only demonstrations outside the court yesterday were by young German Socialists and a handful of Germans who survived Nazi persecution. (UPI, Reuter) |
