Old Nazi Eric Steidtmann Is Nostalgic For The War
ERIC Steidtmann “is a former SS officer who committed mass murder in the war”.
So reports the Sun, which shows a young Herr Steidtmann stood among a group of men in feldgrau. He is made more identifiable by the epithet “evil” and large circle being placed about his head, like a noose.
The confession is rooted in a book written by Lisi Urban, an autobiography in which she tells of her affair with a German Army captain in Prague 1942. To the syncopated backbeat of firing squad, boots on cobbles and Songs of the Antichrist, she fell pregnant. There was talk of marriage. But then the German jilted her and married another woman.
Urban named the soldier Captain Eike. But Steidtmann believed the man was him and launched a libel action to have it proved so.
He wants the records to be correct. So the book’s publishers investigated and discovered that Steidtmann was a German tasked with exterminating the Warsaw ghetto in 1943.
We should thank Steidtmann for his owning up. It is ever harder to spot a bona fide Nazi these days. While old British fighters will be only too happy to turn a yarn about HMS Amethyst and their gallantry and suffering, German ex-soldiers either have to pretend to have spent their youth operating as resistance operatives, disguised as a tree or writing the libretto for the Sound of Music.
Of course, if guilty Herr Steidtmann should be taken from this place made to dig his own grave and watch his children raped and then shot. We can surely indulge an old man this moment of nostalgia…
Posted: 19th, December 2007 | In: Strange But True, Tabloids Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
