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.
Erich Steidtmann, 92, was furious to be portrayed as a philanderer. He launched a lawsuit in Leipzig saying his "honour had been besmirched" in the book An Ordinary Life.
In the resulting legal battle, he has revealed himself as the last known survivor of the SS squads to wipe out the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto.
As the publisher of the memoir and its author prepared their defense, they found pictures of him at the center of one of the worst crimes in history.
Steidtmann's story surfaced because he happened to read the book by Lisl Urban.
A Sudeten German, she was a secretary for the Gestapo in Prague, described by her as a "hotbed of frivolous sexual encounters," one of which she had with an SS man she nicknamed Eick, a police officer who, he claimed, was drafted into the fighting arm of the SS. He was sent to Prague from the Eastern Front for recuperation and to document his experiences in tracking down partisans.
The couple spent 1942 rowing, dining out and staying in -- and Urban fell pregnant. But Eick was posted to Warsaw to guard the Jewish ghetto, the Nazi way station for their extermination camps. Urban had hoped they would marry, but Eick spurned her for a Polish woman. For his illicit liaison he says he was court-martialled and ordered to serve on the Eastern Front.
Nowhere does former art teacher Urban refer to Eick as Steidtmann, but he recognized himself.
He alleges Urban's baby was not his but "a cuckoo's egg."
"To claim this of a captain of the uniformed police is such a reprehensible act that even at 92 I have a right to protect my reputation," he said.
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 Center in Israel is now pressing for him to be retried, claiming the trial did not know of his closeness to Stroop.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of