PLO Said to Have Adopted Nazi Methods in Its Aim to Destroy Israel

Naphtalie Lavie, Israel’s Consul General in New York, charged last night that the Palestine Liberation Organization has adopted the methods of the Nazis in its aim to liquidate Israel.

“The PLO has learned well from the methods and systems of the modern and skillful Nazis,” Lavie, a Holocaust survivor, told more than 80 people who attended an observance marking the 40th anniversary of the Nazi Wannsee Conference that set the Holocaust into motion. Last night’s observance also served as a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. It was sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith and was held at the ADL’s headquarters here.

The PLO, Lavie said, has been taking steps to improve the methods of the Nazis “by means of the most sophisticated weapons which are knowingly supplied to them by the East and West alike.”

Lavie said that the date of January 20,1942 when the Wannsee Conference was held, during which the top Nazi Leadership devised the “final solution” to eliminate European Jewry, “must remind all mankind of the inevitable consequences when a passive majority of the world watched silently the atrocities perpetrated by a minority of fanatics, obsessed by the hypnotic force of a demagogic tyranny.”

Allan Ryan, Jr., director of the Office of Special Investigations of the U.S. Department of Justice, which has been prosecuting Nazi war criminals living in the U.S. said that the Department Is prosecuting at present 24 alleged Nazis in the U.S. He noted that it is a long legal process and that “every day that passes reminds us how little time we have” in pursuing Nazi war criminals in America, since many of them die or deteriorate with age to a point that they no longer are fit to stand trial.

The memorial service was conducted by Rabbi Irving Block and Cantor Stephen Cassell of the Brotherhood Synagogue in Manhattan and Rabbi Amiel Wahl of Temple Israel in New Rochelle.