German Held in WWII Slayings of Over 70,000

A 78-year-old man accused of participating in the murders of more than 70,000 people, most of them Jews, in Ukraine and Poland in 1942 and 1943 was arrested Wednesday, German prosecutors said.

Officials, saying they wanted to protect his family, refused to identify the suspect, who has told them that he killed 500 people--including women and children--in one two-day rampage during World War II.

But other sources named him as Alfons Goetzfried. He is listed as a former “security police” commander and SS member in Nazi-occupied southeastern Poland by the Central Office for the Prosecution of Nazi Crimes, a large German archive.

Neither the archive nor the prosecutors would confirm or deny those reports.

Details of the suspect’s background were sketchy Wednesday. But it appeared that he was not a top or notorious Nazi.

Instead, in a chilling reminder of the wider participation in the Holocaust that killed 6 million Jews, the suspect was said to have been a more common executioner: He was a triggerman with one of the special Nazi killing units that rounded up Jews in Polish and Ukrainian towns, forced them to dig their own mass graves, then shot them so they fell in.

“He was a shooter,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, who is monitoring the case.

Hier added that it was normal practice for top Nazis to let low-ranking, violent fanatics do the dirty work of shooting Jews or pushing them into the gas chambers in death camps.

“After they walked into a town and liquidated the Jews, there were no witnesses,” Hier said. “That’s why there is always a lot of confusion” about the identity of killing units, and why “so many of these killers got off scot-free.”

Hier called the new case “quite unusual” because of the huge volume of alleged killing--the equivalent of eliminating the population of Redondo Beach--and because the German authorities have located other witnesses to the shooting who would be able to testify. “They’re going to move very aggressively,” he predicted.

Until recently, the suspect apparently lived in the former Soviet Union. It was only last year, according to the German authorities, that he came under scrutiny in this country, after he was called to testify in an unrelated court proceeding in the city of Dortmund.

There, he admitted that he personally gunned down about 500 people, including children, at a special mass-killing at the Nazis’ Majdanek death camp, in Lublin, Poland. The massacre bore the code name Operation Harvest Festival.

“Operation Harvest Festival was a sinister way of showing thanksgiving by killing the ‘subhumans,’ ” Hier said.

Records show that over the space of just two days, more than 80,000 Jews from the Lublin area were slain as part of Operation Harvest Festival. Specialists at a museum and archive now standing on the site of the former camp say that dozens of Nazi triggermen were brought to Majdanek from elsewhere in occupied Poland for the slaughter.

The Majdanek camp was built in 1941 as a German prisoner-of-war camp for Soviet captives.

But in May 1942, after the Nazi leadership worked out the details of its plan to systematically exterminate the Jews of Europe, seven gas chambers were installed, and Majdanek became a death camp.

Estimates of the death toll vary. Polish statistics say that 360,000 people were brought to Majdanek and that about 160,000 were gassed, shot or worked to death. But the Wiesenthal Center’s statistics show a death toll of 800,000 to 1 million.

The records are incomplete because those marked for death were taken straight to the gas chambers, without being registered. Also, the Majdanek camp was razed at the end of World War II.

But German prosecutors said the suspect in the current case was arrested by the Soviets after the liberation of Majdanek, taken to the Soviet Union, tried for war crimes and imprisoned in a Siberian work camp. He was released in 1958, then lived for a time in Kazakhstan.

In 1991, he moved to Germany under a program that allows people of German blood to return and receive German passports.

After arriving in Germany, he was called to testify in ongoing Nazi war crimes investigations; in one of those proceedings, he said he had shot the 500 people at Majdanek.

The prosecutor’s office in Stuttgart then researched his activities further, using material from the Central Office for the Prosecution of Nazi Crimes, which keeps files on unsolved war crimes and suspects.

The suspect was arrested at his Stuttgart home Tuesday and is being held in “investigative custody” while formal charges are prepared.

Meanwhile, in Lithuania, a judge Wednesday heard preliminary arguments in a case against a 91-year-old war crimes suspect alleged to have handed over scores of Jews to murder squads.

Aleksandras Lileikis, who was not in court because of health problems, was head of the security police in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, during World War II. He denies that he is guilty of war crimes.

The judge is expected to decide today whether the case will proceed or be returned to prosecutors for further investigation.

* FORD FACES LAWSUIT: A suit alleges that Ford profited from forced labor in Germany during World War II. D1