Ex-Nazi’s Conviction May End War Trials

A court convicted a 79-year-old former Nazi of assisting in the murders of 17,000 Jews at a concentration camp in Poland, ending what could be Germany’s last major war crimes trial. Alfons Goetzfrid, a Ukrainian-born former member of the Gestapo secret police, was found guilty of aiding in a 1943 massacre. A state court in Stuttgart sentenced him to 10 years, less than the 13 years demanded by the prosecutor. But Goetzfrid, an ethnic German who emigrated to Germany in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed, walked free from court because he had already spent 13 years in a Soviet labor camp in Siberia after the war. Prosecutors have said this could be Germany’s final war crimes trial from the Nazi era because time has taken its toll on suspects and witnesses.