The publication of a salacious memoir by a Gestapo secretary, which spurred a
legal battle with her one-time Nazi lover, has exposed
the existence of a commander of the Warsaw Ghetto who was
never prosecuted for his war crimes, the Los Angeles-based
Simon Wiesenthal Center said Monday.
Erich Steidtmann, 92, had launched unsuccessful legal action in a German court
against the book's publication, since it portrayed him
as a philanderer and womanizer who abandoned a woman
he had an affair with when she became pregnant.
The case emerged thanks to
Steidtmann's bruised ego, according to the Wiesenthal
Center's chief Nazi hunter, Dr. Efraim Zuroff, and highlighted
the failure of the German judicial authorities to bring
Holocaust perpetrators to justice. "The unusually extensive coverage of the case stemmed from the prurient interest
of the media rather than the failure of the German judiciary
to prosecute Steidtmann," he said.
Zuroff, who is also the Wiesenthal
Center's Israel director, said German authorities had
previously accepted the SS commander's "patently false" claims that he had fought against 400 German deserters who joined the ghetto
fighters against the Nazis, which led to the decision
not to prosecute him.
"It is now clear
that he lied through his teeth," Zuroff said.
The memoir, An Ordinary Life
by Lisl Urban, does not mention Steidtmann by name. But
he has identified himself as the person in question and,
asserting that his "honor has been besmirched," took legal action to stop the memoir's publication.
A Leipzig court on Monday
allowed publication of the memoir to proceed.
Meanwhile, at the urging of
the Wiesenthal Center, the German authorities have opened
an investigation, Zuroff said.
After the Nazi occupation
of Poland in 1939, more than 450,000 Jews from Warsaw
and its environs were forced into the squalid confines
of the ghetto, where many died of disease and starvation.
Beginning in 1942, some 300,000 Jews were deported from
the ghetto to death camps throughout German-occupied
Poland, mostly to Treblinka.
The Warsaw Ghetto uprising
broke out on April 19, 1943. It was the first urban uprising
in Nazi-occupied Europe, and took the Germans 27 days
to suppress.
jpost.com
|