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Comments (0)A former Nazi SS officer died in Germany two months after the reopening of an investigation into his connection to massacres of Jews.
Erich Steidtmann, who as commander was accused of leading several Nazi police battalions who participated in the mass murder of Jews in Eastern Europe, died this week in Hanover, where he lived. He was 95.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center released a statement Tuesday expressing frustration that Steidtmann was never prosecuted for his crimes, saying it reflected decades of German judicial failure in the case.
“Had the prosecutors done their job properly in the sixties, he would not have escaped justice,” said Efraim Zuroff, the center’s Israel director.
The case was reopened in April based on a letter that Steidtmann wrote in October 1943 that would have placed him in the area of the massacres at the time they occurred rather than at home on leave, as he told prosecutors during investigations in the 1960s, according to The Associated Press.
The case closed quickly for lack of evidence.
“It was only thanks to research by the Wiesenthal Center’s Dr. Stefan Klemp and the Sueddeutsche Zeitung Magazine that the case against Steidtmann was reopened,” Zuroff said, “but unfortunately it will never come to court, nor will Steidtmann ever be punished.”
Israeli Police Heading to Haiti
Israel’s Cabinet agreed to send a group of police officers to Haiti to maintain public order.
The 14 officers will assist the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti, which is working to uphold order and stabilize the area following January’s earthquake. The quake killed more than 100,000, left hundreds of thousands injured and damaged the homes of some 3 million people.
The group, which works on a voluntary basis, will operate as part of a combined force of Israel, Italy and Serbia.
In recent months Israel’s Foreign Ministry, the Ministry of Public Security and the Israel Police have been in contact with the U.N. Department of Peacekeeping Operations and the Italian government and police force to advance the mission.
Immediately following the earthquake, Israel sent a field hospital and an evacuation and rescue team to the island.
“This is a Jewish and humanistic action, and it follows up on the rapidly organized activity that preceded it after the Haitian earthquake,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday following the Cabinet’s decision.
French Writers Confab Canceled Over Israeli Invite
A writer’s conference at a southern French university was canceled when unidentified Arab participants refused to attend with an Israeli author.
The University of Provence Aix-Marseille nixed the conference last week aimed at featuring Mediterranean authors.
“The story beneath all this—and it’s an enigma—is that nobody knows the names of the Arab writers” who refused to dialogue, Esther Orner, the Israeli author who was invited to the confab, told JTA Tuesday.
Jean-Raymond Fanlo, a Spanish literature professor at the University of Provence Aix-Marseille, told the French media that one of the Arab authors against Orner’s presence at the conference was “a major writer around which we will organize a vast program in Marseille schools for back to school.”
Fanlo refused to divulge the author’s name for fear of adding controversy to the widely covered story.
As a result of the Arab refusal, the university said in a July 20 statement that it was forced to cancel the whole program.
The professor who invited Orner to speak on a panel titled “Writing in the Mediterranean” reportedly quit the group that organized the conference following the incident.
“I don’t understand how people from another country can dictate what a prestigious university can do,” Orner said. “I find it incredible.”
Orner said she felt obliged to publicize information about the conditions of her revoked invitation to speak because “individual people like me have to do something” in reaction to propaganda aimed at “delegitimizing Israel.”