Acquitted ex-Nazis flee courtroom uproar

Press, 21 April 1979, Page 9

Acquitted ex-Nazis flee courtroom uproar

NZPA-Reuter Dusseldorf, I (West Germany)l Fighting broke out in a! Dusseldorf court on Thurs-j day when four former Nazis! were acquitted after West! Germany’s longest warcrimes trial of massacring! Jews. Defence lawyers shielded the four — a former S.S. doctor and three women concentration camp guards — as they fled through a back exit. About 300 demonstrators ran into the court room pushing aside officials. Some jumped on tables and unfurled banners calling for the continued prosecution of Nazi criminals. Spectators booed as the verdict was announced. But the acquittal came as no surprise, since the prose- i cution had proposed last month that the four should 1

|be cleared for lack of positive identification. I Heinrich Schmidt, aged 66, jHermine Boettcher, aged 60, J Rosa Suess, aged 60, and '[Charlotte Meyer, aged 61, c /were on trial with nine (others. They were accused ;of murder and complicity to murder at. the Maidanek con-: centration camp in Poland, where at least a quarter of a 1 million people died between 1941 and 1944. The judge said a court could not convict people without conclusive proof. He added: “It is not enough to know that the accused were cogs in the death machine of Maidanek.” The costs of the trial and the defendants’ expenses will be paid by the State, A coplaintiff from Israel, whose , daughter was murdered at ‘ Maidanek, will have to pay her own costs.

After leaving the court, the demonstrators went to , the site of the Dusseldorf; , synagogue destroyed by the. I Nazis on November 10, 1938, , during their first big anti- : Semitic outburst. They laid a I wreath in memory of the > those who died at Maidanek. ■i On one day alone — Sep- , tember 19, 1943 — 17,000 i Jews were murdered at the camp. Schmidt, Boettcher, and Meyer were accused of kill- ! ing at least 314 people in the gas chambers. Suess was accused of shooting a mother and child with a pisj tol. Summing up, the judge said that there was insufficient evidence to prove the charges against them. The four went on trial on November 26, 1975. The trial of the nine other defendants will continue.