Germany Arrests Man In Nazi Atrocities

German authorities announced Wednesday the arrest of a former Nazi officer accused of being an accessory to the wartime killings of more than 70,000 people in Ukraine and Poland.

The suspect, identified as Alfons Goetzfried, 78, had been living in the southern city of Stuttgart since returning from Kazakhstan in 1991 under a program allowing repatriation of ethnic Germans. He had been imprisoned until 1958 at a Siberian penal colony after being found guilty of war crimes by the Soviet Union.

German state prosecutor Sabine Maylaender said Goetzfried was a low-ranking officer for the Gestapo secret police in the Polish city of Lublin who made self-incriminating statements during the course of giving testimony to Nazi war crimes investigators last summer.

An arrest warrant was drawn up for Goetzfried when archive material was found in February that corroborated his statements. During investigations by British and Soviet authorities in the 1950s, prosecutors said, Goetzfried had denied involvement in war crimes and insisted he only tended horses for the German army.

But in his recent testimony, Goetzfried acknowledged he personally had shot to death 500 people, including women and children, during a two-day killing spree called “Operation Harvest Festival” in November 1943 at the Majdanek concentration camp in eastern Poland.