A Jewish leader in Germany has blasted the state government of Brandenberg for declining to try Gustav Just, a former member of its Parliament who admits to having killed Jews during World War II.
“This is a scandal,” cried Heinz Galinski, chairman of the German Jewish community, after a meeting Wednesday with Brandenberg’s prime minister, Manfred Stolpe.
“We are demanding an investigation and an eventual prosecution,” Galinski said.
Just, a prominent Social Democrat, resigned from Parliament on March 10 after admitting complicity in the murders of six Jews in the Ukraine in July 1941, shortly after German forces invaded the Soviet Union.
He confessed when the weekly Welt am Sonntag exposed his role in the 50-year-old crime with information from the files of the former East German Security Ministry, known as the Stasi.
The state government decided not to put Just on trial after concluding that he was forced to participate in the killings. He was a 20-year-old soldier in the Wehrmacht at the time.
But Galinski says testimony and documents in his file show that Just had in fact volunteered to kill the Jews, who were rounded up in a Ukrainian village.
Galinski’s demand for a trial is supported by the Christian Democratic Union, the opposition party in the Brandenberg Parliament. The CDU alleges that the Social Democratic state government kept the case secret for political reasons.
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