A former concentration camp guard
under investigation in Vienna for Nazi-era war crimes died.
Erna Wallisch, 86, born in Germany, worked from 1942 to 1944 in the Majdanek
concentration camp. She was under investigation based on
new evidence recently provided by Poland when she died in
a hospital last Saturday.
Wallisch moved to Vienna after the
war and became an Austrian citizen. Two years ago, Efraim
Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem appealed
to the Polish government to demand her extradition, because
Poland has no statute of limitations on war crimes.
The Vienna State Prosecutor initiated
an investigation of Wallish on murder charges; she claimed
she only guarded prisoners. Recently, however, the Polish
Institute for National Memorial reportedly sent new information
to Vienna: an eyewitness report from someone who had seen
Wallisch beating a prisoner with a piece of wood.
Zuroff said this week that Wallisch
escaped justice due to decades of avoidance by one Austrian
administration after another. Charges against her had been
dropped in the 1970s due to lack of evidence.
"The fact that a woman
who admitted taking people to be gassed and guarding them
so that they could not escape was never held accountable
for her heinous crimes is a badge of shame for Austria and
stark proof of the decades-long lack of political will in
Vienna to bring Austrian Holocaust perpetrators to justice," Zuroff told the German Press Agency.
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