Eighty years ago, Glenolden lawyer Lt. Col. Raymond E. Zickel Sr. prosecuted one of the first Nazi war criminals, Austrian Franz Strasser, at the Dachau trials, one of the first war crime trials in Germany.
More than 1,400 convictions resulted from the trials conducted in the liberated concentration camp at Dachau, Germany.
Lt. Col. Zickel was one of seven men who convicted Strasser and condemned him to death, writes Alex Rose for the Daily Times.
Zickel’s grandson, Joe Brophy, started looking into his grandfather’s participation at the trials 15 years ago because the family never knew the whole story.
“We always had this picture, and we were told originally it was from different places, but we never knew,” Brophy said.
He worked with a film archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Museum’s Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive to find out more.
It turned out the family photo was of Zickel standing with the tribunal during the reading of Strasser’s guilty verdict.
Strasser had been accused of murdering at least two of five U.S. airmen from the 20th Bomb Squadron who surrendered after their plane landed in Kaplice, Czechoslovakia in 1944.
Read more about the life of Lt. Col. Raymond E. Zickel Sr.in the Daily Times.
