Bonn Investigates Official Charged with Annihilating Latvian Jewry

The Foreign Office today appointed Dr. Heinrich Lingemann, a retired Dusseldorf judge, to head an investigation of Dr. Ottro Braeutigam, who has been suspended as head of the East European desk in the Foreign Office because of charges dealing with his role in the extermination of Latvian Jewry.

During the war, Dr. Braeutigam was a top official in the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories. Alfred Rosenberg, notorious Nazi leader who was later hanged at Nuremberg, testified before the International Military Tribunal that Dr. Braeutigam was fully familiar with the program to liquidate the Jews in Eastern Europe. In 1950 a German prosecutor indicted Dr. Braeutigam as an “accessory to murder in numerous cases,” but he was never tried.

Some months ago, a Berlin publishing house issued a documentary work on. “The Third Reich and the Jews,” the authors of which are two well-known Jewish historians, Leon Poliakov and Joseph Wulf. One of the documents reprinted in the book is an official letter in which Dr. Braeutigam, 15 years before, remonstrated with a subordinate for obstructing the extermination of the Jews in the Latvian city of Libau and instructed him that “economic aspects should be left out of consideration in the settlement of this problem.”

Although this communication is published in the printed records of the International Military Tribunal, which refer to Dr. Braeutigam more than a dozen times, he rose to head the East European section of the Bonn Foreign Office. When a Social Democratic Bundestag deputy spotted the letter in the Poliakov Wulf book, he brought it to the attention of Foreign Minister Heinrich von Brentano and insisted that some action be taken After some hesitation, Dr. Braeutigam was suspended. The investigation of Dr. Braeutigam will probably take one or two months.