FACTBOX-Significant Nazi trials

Thu Nov 26, 2009 7:06am EST

Nov 26 (Reuters) - Accused Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk goes on trial in Munich on Monday to face charges that he helped kill 27,900 Jews in 1943 in what will be one of Germany's last major Nazi trials.

Earlier this month, a 90-year-old German man, who was a member of the Nazi SS, was charged by state prosecutors with killing 58 Jews in Austria in March 1945. It is now up to a court to determine whether to put the man on trial.

Here are details of other significant trials of Nazis:



* THE NUREMBERG TRIALS:

-- Between Oct. 1945 and Oct. 1946 an International Military Tribunal tried 22 of the most infamous major Nazi figures in proceedings that came to be known as the Nuremberg trials. Twelve defendants were sentenced to death, three were acquitted, and the rest were sentenced to jail.

-- From Dec. 1946 to April 1949, these courts tried and convicted a further 177 Nazis in 12 trials---known as the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials.



* ITALY:

-- Former Nazi major Karl Hass, who died in 2004, and ex-SS Captain Erich Priebke were convicted of participating in the massacre at the Ardeatine Caves. The massacre took place on March 24, 1944, and is regarded as one of the most serious war crimes committed in Italy. Both were sentenced to life imprisonment.



* FRANCE:

-- Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo police chief in Lyon in World War Two, was extradited to France from his postwar hiding place in Bolivia in 1983 to become the most important former Nazi officer to face his victims in a French court.

-- The "Butcher of Lyon" was accused of ordering the execution of thousands of Jews and resistance fighters, and deporting thousands more, including 44 Jewish children seized near Lyon, to death camps.

-- Sentenced to life imprisonment after the two-month trial, he died of cancer in a Lyon hospital four years later in 1991.

-- Maurice Papon was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 1998 for complicity in crimes against humanity. He was tried for his role in organising the transport of 1,560 Jews to a transit camp on the way to Auschwitz concentration camp.

-- He fled to Switzerland while appealing against his sentence but was arrested by Swiss police and handed over to the French authorities.

-- He was jailed in 1999 but released in Sept. 2002 because of poor health. He died in 2007. Papon protested his innocence to the end but failed in his bid for a retrial.



* THE EICHMANN TRIAL:

-- Adolf Eichmann was nicknamed the "technician of death" for drawing up and coordinating schedules and logistics plans that made Adolf Hitler's "Final Solution" -- the genocide of six million Jews -- possible.

-- He escaped from Germany after World War Two living in Argentina until 1960 when he was found by Israeli Intelligence and smuggled to Israel to face trial.

-- Eichmann was sentenced to death in Dec. 1961 after a lengthy trial for crimes against the Jewish people and crimes against humanity. He was hanged in May 1962. He remains the only person ever to have been executed in Israel. ((For main story on Demjanjuk double click on [ID:nLGEE5AN2EE)) Sources: Reuters/BBC (Writing by David Cutler, London Editorial Reference Unit;) ((david.cutler@thomsonreuters.com; +44 20 7542 7968; Reuters Messaging: david.cutler.reuters.com@reuters.net))

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