Nazis on trial and a community at war
Police chief accused of 30,000 murders
• A man who at the time of his arrest in 1959 was in charge of criminal investigation in almost the whole of the Rhineland, went on trial here this week accused of committing 30,356 murders in occupied Russia between 1941 and 1944. He is 49-year-old Georg Heuser, a former member of the SS who was in charge of a special unit which had the sole task of exterminating Jews, gipsies and mental defectives in the region of Minsk. Charged with him are 11 other members of this special squad. Between them, Heuser and the others are accused of murdering 70,000 people. Heuser was found guilty in 1963 of the murder of 11,103 people. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison, but released in 1969. He died in 1989.
Nazis to appeal against gaol sentences
• C olin Jordan, the leader of the National Socialist Movement and Commander of its Spearhead section, who was sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment at the Central Criminal Court on Monday, is to appeal against his conviction. He and three other Nazis were found guilty on two charges of organising and equipping the Spearhead movement in such a way as to arouse reasonable apprehension that it was being organised for the purpose of using or displaying force in promoting a political object. Before being sentenced Jordan said: “We have done what we have with the idea of forming a group of young people to free Britain from Jewish control. Whatever happens, the National Socialist Movement throughout the world will march on.” Jordan lost his appeal.
Peace-lovers at war
• All the five Hon Officers and the entire Board of Management of the Ahavath Shalom (Love of Peace) — the Federation of Synagogues congregation at Gladstone Park, resigned on Monday over a dispute with their minister, the Rev I Landau. “This is a Federation Synagogue,” Mr Landau told me. “Everybody is a President and a Warden here.”