A court in Lwow, Soviet Poland, has sentenced nine Red Army officers and soldiers to death and 143 others to heavy prison terms for permitting Jewish refugees to enter from Nazi Poland and accepting bribes from them, official Polish quarters here reported today.
Twenty Jewish soldiers among the 172 defendants were acquitted when the court accepted their explanations and evidence that they had not taken money from refugees but had permitted them to cross the border out of humanitarian motives, it was said.
The defendants included 12 officers and 160 privates. According to the Polish report, the trial caused great uneasiness and depression among the Jewish population, who feared that the Soviet-German frontier might be entirely closed as result of the trial.
A number of synagogues in Lwow, Soviet Poland, have been converted into Jewish workers’ clubs, it was also reported here.
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