Ex-Nazi Gets 4-Year Term for War Crimes

FRANKFURT, West Germany — An 81-year-old former Nazi officer who took part in what a judge called crimes of “scarcely imaginable, callous brutality” against a group of Poles during World War II was jailed for four years by a court here Tuesday.

Friedrich Paulus, who was a captain in the dreaded Nazi SS security force, was found guilty of being an accessory to the murder of 161 civilians at a village near Lublin in Poland in 1940 during a “revenge action.”

The sentence came after a court ruling in 1982 had been thrown out by the West German Supreme Court on a technicality.

The presiding judge said the victims were murdered in a “brutal and bestial fashion simply because they were Poles.”

He rejected a plea by the prosecutor, who had called for a two-year suspended sentence for Paulus. The judge said that such a sentence would be “contrary to justice and make us appear ridiculous.”