Benjamin Sijes, a Dutch Jewish historian who helped compile evidence in the trials of Nazi war criminals in Holland and West Germany and often served as an expert witness for the prosecution, died here Sunday at the age of 73. Sijes, who was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Amsterdam in 1970, was a specialist on Nazi persecution of Jews and other minorities.
In 1945 he was appointed to the staff of the newly formed Netherlands State Institute for War Crimes Documentation and frequently worked in close cooperation with Simon Wiesenthal, director of the Vienna-based war crimes Documentation Center. During the past 10 years he was engaged in research on the persecution of Gypsies by the Nazi regime and published a book on that subject.
Sijes served for one year as Professor Extraordinary in the Cleveringa Chair at the University of Leyden, established in memory of the late Prof. Rudolph Cleveringa who was well known for his protests against the dismissal of his Jewish colleagues from the university when the Nazis occupied Holland in 1940.
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