The office of West German Chancellor Dr. Konrad Adenauer came to the defense of State Secretary Hans Globke today against recurrent charges that Dr. Globke had been involved as a Nazi official in the persecution of Jews.
A declaration by the Federal Chancellory was read on the twice-a-week Eichmann trial television program in which the flat assertion was made that “Dr. Globke was not connected with the persecution of Jews, directly or indirectly.”
The declaration also asserted that the charges against Dr. Globke, who was an official in the Nazi Ministry of the Interior, were the result of propaganda of the East German regime furthered by Friedrich Kaul, an East German attorney, who “has been attacking the trial in Jerusalem.”
The declaration claimed that Dr. Globke “fought against” the persecutions “with all means at his disposal. “His commentary on the Nuremberg racial laws.”aided many victims of nazism, ” the statement said. This was a reference to repeated charges that Dr. Globke’s commentaries worsened their application to Jews.
“The claim by Dr. Max Merten, the former war commissioner in Salonika, who was sentenced to 25 years imprisonment by a Greek tribunal, that Dr. Globke had prevented the liberation of 10,000 Greek Jews has long since been proved false, ” the Chancellory statement continued. “Dr. Globke never had anything to do with Eichmann.”
Although the charges have been ignored by West German newspapers close to the Bonn Government, such as the Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung, the opposition news-papers have been devoting considerable attention to them.
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