In a letter to Federal Chancellor Adenauer, the well known young journalist Michael Heinze-Mansfeld, during the last war a much-decorated and frequently wounded junior officer of the German Army, exposes a number of senior officials of the present Federal Government as key man in carrying out the Nazi program of extermination directed against the Jews of Europe.
The present head of the East European desk in the Bonn Foreign Office, Heinze-Mansfeld’s communication discloses, is Dr. Otto Braeutigam, during the war Deputy Chief of the Political Department in Alfred Rosenberg’s Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories. He played a leading role in arranging for the deportation and decimation of the Jews in the Baltic States, the Ukraine and Byelo-Russia, as is evident from his own diary, as well as from the files of the International Military Tribunal.
In the Bonn Ministry of Justice, Heinze-Mansfeld further points out, Counsellor of Ministry Dr. Franz Massfeller is in charge of drafting new marriage and family legislation. It is the same Massfeller who once wrote the official commentary to the “Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor.” He composed the “expert legal opinion” which permitted the non-Jewish partners of mixed marriages to sue for divorce merely because of the Jewish antecedents of their spouses.
In 1944, Dr. Massfeller represented the most notorious Nazi People’s Court “blood judge,” Roland Freisler, at the infamous “Wannsee Conference” of Nazi experts on Jewish affairs. They deliberated whether, after the impending deportation of the last Jews from Germany to extermination camps in Eastern Europe, half-Jews should suffer the same fate or merely be subjected to sterilization.
Heinze-Mansfeld also assails Lt. Col. Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz, now employed by German Defense Commissioner Blank. In the days of the Weimar Republic, Heinze-Mansfeld reminds Dr. Adenauer, Heinz was “a pioneer of bloody and murderous National Socialism and anti-Semitism,” as well as an accessory to murders, such as the assassination of Jewish Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau.
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.
