Israeli newspapers today featured excerpts from the Nuremberg war crimes trial protocol showing that West Germany’s present State Secretary, Dr. Hans Globke, had known about the Nazi mass executions of Jews several years before World War II ended.
Dr. Globke, principal aide to West Germany’s Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, has denied such awareness. After Adolf Eichmann brought his name into the Eichmann trial defense here, last week. Dr. Globke stated in an interview at Bonn that he had not learned until after the war was over about the Nazi program for the annihilation of the Jews. Admitting that he had, indeed, written the official, legal commentary of the Nuremberg racist laws under the Hitler regime, Dr. Globke has insisted that he had tried to help Jews, and that he had known nothing of the mass executions of Jews until after the collapse of the Nazi regime.
According to the newspapers, however, the Nuremberg protocols cite Dr. Globke as admitting to an American prosecutor, during cross-examination at the Nuremberg trial, that “well-informed circles in Germany” knew of the mass executions of Jews from foreign broadcasts and through word of mouth brought back to the civilian population by German soldiers on leave from the Western front. Dr. Globke had also said during the Nuremberg trials that he thought that, in addition to those Jews who had been killed, there were others kept in concentration camps.
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