2RHPZ
12-17-2007, 12:50 PM
SS member 'outed' after book claim
By ALLAN HALL
IN BERLIN
A FORMER member of Hitler's elite SS may have indicted himself as a mass murderer after stepping from the shadows to complain about an elderly woman's wartime memoir.
Erich Steidtmann, 92, was offended to be portrayed as a philanderer who fathered a child out of wedlock in the Second World War and launched a lawsuit in a court in Leipzig saying his "honour had been besmirched" in the book A Perfectly Normal Life.
But in doing so he has revealed himself to be the last known survivor of the SS killing squads which wiped out the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. Now the battle is on by the publisher of the memoir, its author and Nazi-hunters to place Steidtmann at the epicentre of one of the worst crimes in history.
The story of Steidtmann, now a pensioner in East Germany, only surfaced because he happened to read a book by Lisl Urban. One of the so-called Sudeten Germans of Czechoslovakia, Mrs Urban worked as a secretary for the Gestapo in occupied Prague.
Link - English (http://thescotsman.scotsman.com:80/ViewArticle.aspx?articleid=3538300)
Longer German article (http://www.welt.de/kultur/article1341609/Streit_um_One-Night-Stand_eines_SS-Offiziers.html)
By ALLAN HALL
IN BERLIN
A FORMER member of Hitler's elite SS may have indicted himself as a mass murderer after stepping from the shadows to complain about an elderly woman's wartime memoir.
Erich Steidtmann, 92, was offended to be portrayed as a philanderer who fathered a child out of wedlock in the Second World War and launched a lawsuit in a court in Leipzig saying his "honour had been besmirched" in the book A Perfectly Normal Life.
But in doing so he has revealed himself to be the last known survivor of the SS killing squads which wiped out the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. Now the battle is on by the publisher of the memoir, its author and Nazi-hunters to place Steidtmann at the epicentre of one of the worst crimes in history.
The story of Steidtmann, now a pensioner in East Germany, only surfaced because he happened to read a book by Lisl Urban. One of the so-called Sudeten Germans of Czechoslovakia, Mrs Urban worked as a secretary for the Gestapo in occupied Prague.
Link - English (http://thescotsman.scotsman.com:80/ViewArticle.aspx?articleid=3538300)
Longer German article (http://www.welt.de/kultur/article1341609/Streit_um_One-Night-Stand_eines_SS-Offiziers.html)