A cowardly convicted Nazi war criminal living in Canada was in jail this weekend after an appeals court upheld an extradition order from Italy, where he was convicted in absentia. Michael Seifert, the so-called “Beast of Balzano,” was sentenced to life after being found guilty in 2000 of nine counts of murder, committed during his term as an SS guard at the Bolzano prison transit camp in northern Italy. The Italian government alleged the 83-year-old Seifert beat, tortured, starved and murdered inmates. People testified that Seifert starved a 15-year-old prisoner to death, gouged out a person’s eyes, beat prisoners before
Read More +Investigators are closing in on one of the last living top Nazi war criminals, Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine reported on Saturday. Spiegel magazine said investigators were focusing on Spain and Austria in their hunt for 93-year-old Aribert Heim, known as “Dr Death” at the Mauthausen concentration camp. Germany has for decades been searching for Heim, an SS doctoraccused of having killed hundreds of concentration camp inmateswith heart injections.Earlier this month, Austria said it was offering a 50,000 euro(e68,260) reward for information leading to the arrest of Heimand Alois Brunner, an aide to Adolf Eichmann who helped organisethe deportation of Jews
Read More +Sponsored by Aish.com: In 1946, Jewish refugees from the Holocaust, with no other place to go, returned to their hometown of Kielce, Poland — and were attacked by the townspeople in a bloody pogrom that left 42 Jews dead and 80 wounded. The pogrom began when rumors spread that Jews had kidnapped a Polish child. Polish policemen and soldiers entered the Jewish residences and began the violence; the Jews were then attacked outside by mobs in a fray that lasted five hours. Some 3 million Polish Jews had been murdered in the Holocaust, yet this pogrom — occurring 15 months
Read More +Kurt Waldheim, the former UN secretary general and president of Austria whose hidden complicity in Nazi war crimes was exposed late in his career, died Thursday in Vienna, Austrian media reported. He was 88. He died of heart failure, the state broadcaster ORF reported. Although it was never proved that Waldheim himself committed atrocities during World War II, he was a lieutenant in army intelligence, attached to brutal German military units that executed thousands of Yugoslav partisans and civilians and deported thousands of Greek Jews to death camps from 1942 to 1944. Waldheim lied about his wartime service in the
Read More +From JPost: Goni, an Argentine researcher and journalist said he feels “a strong sense of relief” after a three year battle in Italian courts ended with convicted Nazi war criminal Erich Priebke’s lawsuit against him being thrown out. Goni was referring to a Milan court’s March 23 decision to reject a claim by Priebke, who had sued Goni and his Italian publisher for 50,000 euros for libel. The court not only tossed out Priebke’s claim as unfounded but assessed him legal costs of nearly $11,000. Priebke is known for filing lawsuits, and Italian newspapers and magazines rejected many other articles
Read More +From JPost: Despite the more than 60 years that have passed since the Holocaust, the number of Nazi war criminals being convicted is on the rise, a report released Thursday by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles shows. Nineteen Nazi war criminals were convicted over the last year,up from 16 a year earlier and five the year before that, according to the center’s seventh annual report. Fourteen of the 19 Nazis found guilty last year were convicted in absentia in Italy. The report slams Germany, Austria and Poland for failing toachieve “any progress” against the war criminals over the
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