Justice Minister Moshe Nissim, speaking before the Knesset, called on West Germany today to nullify the acquital of two Nazi war criminals and to have the two placed on trial again.
Wilhelm Westerheide and Yohanna Zelle, who were tried in Dortmund on charges of participation in the murder of 9,000 Jews in the Vladimir ghetto, were recently acquitted. Nissim spoke in reply to an urgent motion to the agenda by an Alignment Member of the Knesset, Prof. Shevah Weiss.
Weiss said the fight against the “deformation of mankind, as it was expressed in Nazi crimes during the Holocaust” had to be fought constantly. He said “it is not merely a matter of revenge, although that too is legitimate in this context.”
Weiss asked how the prosecutor in Dortmund could successfully argue that the evidence presented at the trial by Holocaust survivors was “insufficient,” when many of the witnesses fainted when they saw Westerheide enter the courtroom. Weiss called the acquittal “a horrifying phenomenon.”
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