Former SS member outed at trial

A court action over honor and a baby has revealed a former SS guard's involvement with the Warsaw ghetto. Story published today by The Guardian:

A former member of Hitler's SS has gone to court claiming his reputation has been ruined by a book - not because it exposed his part in the Holocaust but because it accused him of abandoning a woman he had an affair with when she became pregnant.

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In trying to preserve his reputation as an 'honourable serviceman' 'Eick' outed himself as the bodyguard of Juergen Stroop, tasked by Hitler with destroying the ghetto after the Jews rose up in January 1943. Over four months, 13,000 people were shot or burned to death and the remaining 50,000 sent to death camps.

Steidtmann was exonerated in a postwar trial as having 'minimal involvement' in crushing the uprising, but the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Israel is now pressing for him to be retried, claiming the trial did not know of his closeness to Stroop.