An 83-year-old former SS lieutenant was sentenced to 12 years yesterday for murdering seven Jewish concentration camp prisoners in the last months of the second World War.
Julius Viel denied murdering the seven as they worked near the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1945. After the war he became a respected regional newspaper journalist and received a German government order of merit in 1983.
The white-haired man remained impassive as the sentence was read out in a Ravensburg courtroom yesterday. "I'm sorry for my wife's sake," he said after the trial ended.
Judge Hermann Winkler denied prosecution calls for a life sentence, taking into account Mr Viel's advanced age and ill-health. "The defendant knows he did away with people and not animals," he said. "We owe it to the victims that this wrong is righted. Every perpetrator should know that even after a long time he can be brought to justice."
The German media dubbed the case "the last Nazi war crimes trial" because many potential accused are already dead or are too old or ill to stand trial for crimes committed under Nazi rule.
A previous investigation of Viel in the 1960s was closed after a key witness for the prosecution died before giving evidence. Police reopened the investigation in 1997 when a witness to the shootings came forward.
Dr Adalbert Lallier, a retired university professor now living in Montreal, was a member of Viel's SS troop at Theresienstadt from the age of 17.
He told of how, in the last days of the war, with allied forces approaching from both sides, over 1,700 inmates from the concentration camp were forced to use cutlery and their bare hands to dig tank traps, huge trenches in the sodden soil. One day he witnessed Viel take a rifle and shoot dead seven Jewish prisoners at point-blank range.
Viel admitted he was a member of the SS but said he was posted in Vienna at the time and heard of Theresienstadt for the first time after the war. He accused Dr Lallier of "shocking cheek" and his defence tried, unsuccessfully, to cast doubt on the professor's testimony.
Dr Lallier is now the subject of legal proceedings in Canada to establish whether he should have his citizenship withdrawn because he was a member of the SS, the Nazi party's elite police force.
