The defense attorney for a former SS officer on trial in Dusseldorf for the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Treblinka concentration camp during the war charged today that “countless German judges and prosecutors” now serving in the West German judiciary had collaborated with the Nazis in the crimes against the Jews.
The attorney, Hans Joachim Gohring, was pleading for acquittal of his client, Kurt Franz, formerly the deputy commandant of Treblinka. Pointing out to the court that Franz had only a meager education, while judges and lawyers were highly-educated men, he said that many of these judicial officers, in the system now, had “cooperated closely with the Gestapo and the other Third Reich organizations for the crimes committed during those years.”
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