Former Hitler aide, 97, signed ’start order’ for mass execution of Jews

MELBOURNE - An elderly German man has been accused of signing the orders that began the Nazis’ campaign of genocide.

Court papers filed in the US on Tuesday alleged that 97-year-old Bernhard Frank, largely ignored by World War II historians, apparently admitted to playing a key role in signing and distributing orders from Heinrich Himmler during interviews with an undercover American author in Frankfurt, reports News.com.au.

Mark Gould, a historian and filmmaker, posed as a neo-Nazi in order to record a series of interviews with Frank, in which he confessed that he had signed the ’start order’ for the first mass execution of Jews in the Pripjet Swamps near the Polish-Ukrainian border on July 28, 1941.

However, a leading Nazi-hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center has cast doubt on the supposed confession of the former aide to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

“He’s attributed with far more responsibility and criminal guilt than he actually deserves,” said Efraim Zuroff.

“There seems to be a very deliberate inflation of the criminal aspect of his activities,” he added.

It is alleged that Frank is the last senior member of Himmler’s personal staff living openly in Germany today.(ANI)