border, were condemned to death in absentia; Hoff and Wulf received 10 years of hard labour and Paula Geissler received 3 years in prison. After an appeal before the tribunal of Marseille, Hoff's sentence was reduced, on 27 May 1952, to 5 years inclusive of time served. Hoff was released following the sentencing in his appeal. Wulf had been pardoned by French President Vincent Auriol and released in the week prior. After Lammerding was sentenced to death, the French government requested his extradition, alongside the British Occupying Forces at the end of January 1953 and an arrest warrant was issued for Lammerding by the British High Commissioner on 27 February 1953 under law number 10 of the Allied Control Council. However, these garnered no response and Lammerding was never inconvenienced by justice. Until his death, Lammerding denied all responsibility for the massacre in Tulle, declaring instead that the initiative was taken by the SS-Sturmbannführer Kowatsch: "knowing the rigorous hierarchy and the terribly rigid discipline which reigned in the SS corps, such a statement is without merit.". After having equally denied, at a previous time, having been present in Tulle at all, he did change his story to confirm that he arrived there late in the afternoon, after the hangings: however the Division's war diary for 10 June 1944 was written by Lammerding in Tulle and that dated 9 June first gave the time as 12:15 though this entry "was later overwritten to read 23:15." The presence of Lammerding in Tulle and its environs by noon on the 9 June is equally attested by the military doctor of the German garrison, Dr Schmidt. Proceedings were opened against Lammerding by the Central Office of North Rhine-Westphalia in December 1961, in the course of which Lammerding was questioned in February 1962; on 9 October 1962, the director of the Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes issued a stay of proceedings based solely on Lammerding's version of events. It was not until the civil proceedings, brought in Düsseldorf by Lammerding, against the Communist weekly Die Tat, who had accused him in their 17 July 1965 edition of having been condemned to death in France for the murder of numerous hostages, that German courts established, though without real consequences, that Lammerding did bear responsibility in the massacre at Tulle. The legal findings quite clearly dismiss Lammerding's claims: