German Teacher Caught Stealing 10 Victims Items From Auschwitz
A teacher from Germany was arrested at Auschwitz after being caught with items that belonged to Holocaust victims.
The 47-year-old educator on Tuesday admitted to taking the items from an area where possessions of the former concentration camp inmates had been stored during World War II. He said he wanted to show the items to his students, who are studying the Holocaust.
The teacher pleaded guilty and was levied a suspended jail sentence and a fine by a local court, the French news agency AFP reported. He could have faced up to 10 years in prison for stealing goods of special cultural importance.
The man’s bag held 10 items, including a fork, a fragment of scissors and pieces of pottery, gathered from an area where warehouses once stood. The warehouses, called “Canada” by the inmates, were set on fire at the end of the war by the Nazis.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO