The World : Ex-Nazi Guard Sentenced

A 74-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard was sentenced to four years in prison for complicity in the 1944 killing of German Communist Party leader Ernst Thaelmann. Thaelmann’s daughter, Irma Gabel-Thaelmann, conducted a 25-year crusade that led to the trial in Krefeld, West Germany, of Ernst Otto, a retired teacher who served a seven-year sentence after World War II for offenses at the Buchenwald prison camp. As the camp commandant’s clerk, Otto carried out orders to assemble a firing squad to shoot Thaelmann, prepare the crematorium for his body and notify authorities in Berlin of the execution.