FEATURED JOBS
Comments (0)Germany’s highest court turned down an appeal from accused Nazi camp guard John Demjanjuk.
The rebuff Wednesday by Germany’s Constitutional Court means that the war crimes trial of the former American citizen will begin Nov. 30 in Munich, as scheduled.
Demjanjuk, 89, is charged with being an accessory in the murder of 27,900 people in the Nazi death camp Sobibor. If convicted, he could face a prison sentence of up to 15 years.
The trial is expected to end in May. Demjanjuk has denied the charges and said he was a Soviet prisoner of war in a German camp.
In 2002, the U.S. Justice Department charged Demjanjuk with being a guard at Sobibor and revoked his citizenship for lying about his Nazi past in order to gain citizenship. He was extradited to Germany in May.
In the early 1980s, Demjanjuk was accused of being the notorious guard “Ivan the Terrible” at the Treblinka death camp. He was deported to Israel in 1986 and sentenced to death in 1988. But the Israeli Supreme Court overturned his conviction in 1993 after finding reasonable doubt that he was the guard in question.
Aussie Paper Rues Mention of School Molestation
An Australian newspaper apologized for referring to allegations of child molestation at a fervently Orthodox school in an article about the death of an American visitor.
The Age, Melbourne’s main broadsheet, printed an apology Tuesday for “any hurt caused” in its July 24 article—headlined “Motorcycle victim was Holocaust survivor”—about the death of Yitzchok Rotenberg, a fervently Orthodox Jew from New York who was visiting family in Melbourne. Rotenberg, 71, was struck by a motorcycle while crossing a street in Melbourne on July 22.
The article made reference to the scandal earlier this year surrounding the principal of the Adass Israel girls’ school who “fled to Israel ahead of allegations of molesting teenage girls at the school.”
John Searle, president of the Jewish Community Council of Victoria, in a letter to Age editor Paul Ramadge blasted the “tabloid journalism” that “smeared a grieving family by gratuitously connecting their name to what supposedly occurred at the Adass school.”
He then took the matter to the Australian Press Council, and following further discussions the apology was printed in Tuesday’s editions.
“I am satisfied with this apology and now consider this particular matter closed,” Searle said in a statement released Tuesday, noting that Ramadge had recently addressed a public meeting of the Jewish community that was “open and frank.”
Complaints Spur Thais to Cover Hitler Billboard
A giant billboard showing Adolf Hitler giving a Nazi salute located along a major highway in Thailand was covered up.
The billboard, which for two weeks had advertised a waxworks museum set to open in the coastal city of Pattaya, read in Thai “Hitler is not dead.”
It was covered Sunday after about 100 complaints and a protest letter from the Israeli Embassy, as well as a complaint from the German Embassy, according to the Bangkok Post.
Louis Tussaud’s Waxworks managing director Somporn Naksuetrong apologized for the billboard.
“It is totally unacceptable to have such a monster like Adolf Hitler on public display,” Israeli Ambassador Itzhak Shoham told the Bangkok Post. “How this could happen is beyond my understanding and comprehension.”