S.S. General For Trial

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31256, 31 December 1966, Page 11

S.S. General For Trial

(N.Z. Preso Assn. —Copi/rightl

MUNICH, Dec. 30. A former Nazi S.S. general who may have been responsible for the death of Anne Frank will go on trial in Munich on January 23 charged with complicity in the mass murder of Jews in occupied Holland. An indictment issued by the Munich prosecutor’s office yesterday charged Wilhelm Harster, aged 82, with organising and supervising a Nazi round-up of Dutch Jews on orders from the late Gestapo chief, Reinhard Heydrich. Anne Frank, the 14-year-old Jewish girl whose diary became a world best-seller

and a film, was among those arrested. She died in a Nazi concentration camp, as did millions of Jews during World War IL

Sharing the prisoners’ dock with Harster will be two war-time aides, a former S.S. major, Wilhelm Zoepf, and Miss Bertrud Slottke, his former secretary. The two are accused of helping in the “final solution of the Jewish question” in war-time Holland. Zoepf is accused of running, the so-called Jewish Department in The Hague on instructions from Adolf Eichmann, who was convicted and hanged by Israel in 1962 for his' role in Hitler’s liquidation of European Jewry. Miss Slottke, according to the indictment, was an aide of the various chiefs of the Jewish Department. V

The indictment accused Harster of the “systematic deportation of Jews” to the Auschwitz death camp. The three defendants are also accused of responsibility for shipping 4000 Jews to the Mauthausen concentration camp in 1942. Of the 94,398 Jews sent to Auschwitz and Sobibor camps, the indictment said, only 1070 survived the collapse of the Third Reich in 1945.

Harster, who was chief of the Nazi espionage service in occupied Holland, was arrested last as were Miss Slottke and zoepf.

He served six years in a Dutch prison for occupation crimes. The Bavarian State Government retired him from his post as financial adviser in 1962 “for reasons of health.”