Two high officials of the Federal Ministry for Refugees were accused here today of “drastic” anti-Semitic activities under the Nazi regime. Both men have been serving in the Ministry under Dr. Theodor Oberlaender, former Cabinet head of the Ministry, who resigned recently under fire as an alleged Nazi collaborator.
The accused are Werner Ventzki, chief of the Ministry’s Berlin section, and Dr. H. Goldschmidt, head of the Ministry’s foreign section, with headquarters at Bonn. Significantly, the charges against the two officials were printed in the “Rheinischer” Merkur,” a weekly periodical considered close to the Adenauer Government and close to the Christian Democratic Union, the dominant party in the Federal Government.
According to the newspaper. Ventzki had been the Nazi-appointed Mayor of Lodz, Poland, during the period when the Jewish ghetto was established in Lodz and 270,000 Jews were exterminated. Goldschmidt is accused of having been the deputy chief of the Nazi administration in Hungary, whence thousands, of Jews had been sent to death camps. The newspaper, after citing the wartime Nazi records of the two officials, demanded that “all offices of the Federal Republic must be swept clean of persons who were connected” with the persecution of Jews during the Nazi regime.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
