Dutch Higher Court Sentences Orthodox Jew to Six Years Imprisonment for Nazi Collaboration

The Special Court of Appeals at The Hague handed down today its verdict in the retrial of Frederik Weinreb, a Dutch Orthodox Jew, finding him guilty and sentencing him to six years imprisonment. A court on a lower level previously sentenced him to only three-and-a-half years in prison.

The 37-year-old former Dutch Jewish leader was charged with having collaborated with the Nazi security service in the Netherlands during the war and with having betrayed fellow Jews to the Nazis. (A number of Dutch Jews now living in the United States have insisted that, on the contrary, Weinreb saved them from Nazi efforts to send them to extermination camps and rescued many other Dutch Jews under the pretext of “helping” the Nazis.)

The court ruled that Weinreb was proved to have collaborated with the Nazi security service and to have betrayed four Dutchmen to these police officers. Weinreb was also adjudged guilty of espionage against fellow prisoners at the Scheveningen concentration camp.

In pronouncing sentence, the judge ruled that Weinreb may have had good intentions in the beginning. (His defenders say he was originally arrested soon after liberation on the testimony of a Dutch Nazi and Gestapo agent, J.H.C. Krom, who has since repudiated his evidence. The defenders say that Weinreb forged German credentials, from non-existent generals, and used them to gain the confidence of the Nazis whom he thereupon duped into helping him save certain Dutch Jews from the Nazi extermination camps.)

JUDGE SAYS DEFENDANT MAY HAVE INTENDED TO SAVE JEWS

The judge went on to say that Weinreb may have intended to save all the Jews whose names he gave to the security service, but he should have been warned of the duplicity of the Nazis when most of them were deported. Instead, the court went on, Weinreb drew up a second list and handed it to the security service, and received from the Jews on that list large sums of money, both from the Netherlands and Belgium, most of which was paid to Germans. The judge said it could be admitted that Weinreb was in a precarious position and wanted to save himself and his family, but he put the interests of his fellow Jews second.

(Weinreb’s defenders say he did receive 100 guilders from each Jew he undertook to save, that most of the money was paid as bribes to Nazis, that the rest fed and housed Jews and that Weinreb himself was penniless at the end of the war. The American Jewish Congress and the Agudas Israel World Organization have intervened in Weinreb’s behalf. Jacob Rosenheim, world president of Agudas Israel, called the Weinreb affair “a kind of new Dreyfus case in our times.” The Chief Rabbi of the Netherlands has also defended him. The charge has been made by Weinreb’s lawyers that some police officials are “railroading” Weinreb to cover up their own pro-Nazi activities.)

Weinreb, during his trial, withdrew previous charges of mistreatment of him during the preliminary investigation of his case and disavowed his earlier accusations of anti-Semitism.