A 64-year-old German Jew was called on today to testify in the trial of 21 top German diplomats and ministers who are charged with war crimes against humanity.
Dr. M, Mosses, who was dismissed from the German civil service in Berlin in 1933 because he was facially unreliable,” told the court he served as legal consultant for the Jewish community after his dismissal until 1943 when he was went to the Theresienstadt concentration camp.
Describing the deportation scenes in Berlin, Mossee said the Nazis confiscated valuable personal possessions belonging to the deportees, paying ridiculously low, token sums for them.
He charged that 35,000 Jews from all parts of Europe died in the Theresienstadt camp which held a total of 140,000 inmates. The remaining 95,000 were deported to the death camps in Poland, he added, Mossee also described how the Nazis produced a “phony movie and staged an inspection tour of the camp to impress a group of visiting Scandinavians.”
The court will decide next week on whether to permit testimony relating to persecutions dating back to the period before 1939. The first international tribunal here ruled that all testimony pertaining to pre-1939 persecution was not valid.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
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.