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.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to