German Court Tosses 1944 Nazi Massacre Case Against 89-Year-Old
A German court has thrown out a case against a Cologne man for his alleged involvement in the June 1944 massacre of hundreds of civilians in France.
Named only as Werner C., the 89-year-old defendant was charged by the prosecutor in the western German city of Dortmund with gunning down 25 civilians in Oradour-sur-Glane along with other members of his SS tank infantry unit called Der Fuhrer.
In all, 642 village residents were murdered. More than half were women and children locked into a church that was set ablaze. The defendant reportedly also was charged as an accessory in the church massacre by cordoning off and guarding the church or by bringing flammable material inside.
A Cologne state court threw out the case saying there was not enough evidence to connect him to the massacre, the Associated Press reported.
Werner C. has said he was in the village at the time but did not take part in the killings.
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
