Word: manstein
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...visit his wife, who is critically ill in a Black Forest hospital, officials of the British military prison at Werl signed a seven-day parole for ex-Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, the Wehrmacht's 63-year-old Panzer specialist, who is serving a twelve-year war crime sentence. One condition of the leave: a pledge of honor not to talk to reporters...
...Manstein admitted that he condoned executions of the wives of Russian partisan fighters as reprisals for attacks on German soldiers. But, he argued, the Russians themselves never adhered to any rules of war. "The shooting of women is not very nice," said Manstein. "But sometimes the partisan war did not make anything else possible . . . The [Russian] civilians used every form of illegal warfare possible-shooting in the back, wearing German uniforms, employing women and children as spies and poisoning the water supply...
After four years in British custody without trial, Manstein was finally brought before a British military tribunal in Hamburg last August. Britons raised a ?1,620 fund to help pay for his defense; Winston Churchill contributed...
Limited Extent. Gist of the 77,000-word, 17-point indictment was that Erich von Manstein had permitted atrocities in areas under his command; had condoned the shooting, gassing and drowning of Jews, gypsies and other minorities, the execution of Russian soldiers, political commissars and civilians, and the deportation of Russians to Germany for slave labor. The defense tried to show that there was little to connect their client personally with any of these deeds. The slaughter of Jews, contended his British and German lawyers, was carried out by an SS unit attached to Manstein's command only...
This week in a hushed courtroom packed with German spectators, many of them with the stiff, erect bearing of former Wehrmacht officers, Manstein heard the verdict. He was found guilty on nine counts concerning execution and maltreatment of Russian soldiers and civilians; he was cleared of eight other counts, notably concerning the extermination of Jews. Then the court pronounced sentence: 18 years in prison. For 62-year-old Field Marshal Fritz Erich von Manstein, it was probably a life term...