Two Congressmen, a Democrat and a Republican, today voiced demands in the House for closer scrutiny of West Germany’s NATO role as a result of German collaboration with the Egyptian program to develop weapons of mass destruction for use against Israel.
Rep. Leonard Farbstein, a member of the House Foreign Affairs, Committee, charged that Bonn was trying to “hide behind a cloak of spurious legalism all too reminiscent of the ‘laws’ of the Nazi era under which Germans said they were ‘only doing their duty.’ ” He said that German moral maturity was now in doubt at the very time that the Germans are boldly demanding stronger influence in NATO and nuclear weaponry.
Instead of contributing its fair share to peaceful development of developing countries, in view of the prosperous German economy, he said, Germans are “irresponsibly seeking to grow even more prosperous as merchants of death. ” According to Rep. Farbstein, “Bonn has as much a governmental responsibility to keep radiological and germ rockets out of Egyptian hands as the United States has to prevent its citizens and industries from doing similar work for Castro Cuba which, incidentally, is a good friend of Nasserite Egypt.”
Rep. Seymour Halpern, New York Republican, said that West Germany had “defaulted on a grave moral responsibility by permitting Germans and German interests to help Nasser effectuate his threats to destroy those escapees from German barbarism who now reside in Israel.”
He said that it was not a technical or legalistic problem but “a test of the German conscience and the pious professions of sorrow over the murder of 6, 000, 000 human beings merely because of their religion. ” According to Rep. Halpern, “Bonn could quickly enough find applicable laws and authority to prevent German scientists from going into East Germany and building the same kinds of dreadful weapons. Yet German technicians and scientists, zealous, unrepentant Nazis among them, are now working with the Soviet-trained and Soviet-equipped Egyptian military forces.”
State Department sources today make known that the Department is opposed to the proliferation of military ultimate weapons, by manufacture or acquisition, by either the Arab States or Israel, but stressed that the United States Government has no evidence that any weapons of mass destruction are being produced by the United Arab Republic.
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