Trial of Rumanians Charged with Massacre of 12,000 Jews Opens in Bucharest

The trial of Rumanians charged with organizing a program in the city of Jassy on the 29th of June, 1941 during which 12,000 Jews were massacred opened here today before the special tribunal for war criminals.

The former chief of police in Jassy, during whose administration the pogrom took place and who is among the persons on trial, today testified that the chief instigator of the massacres was Prof. Horya Hulubey, former rector of Bucharest University. Professor Hulubey is at present on the medical faculty of Bucharest University. The trial is expected to last several days.

The Moscow radio today broadcast an article by Ilya Ehrenbourg, published in pravda, demanding that no mercy be shown to Germans for the crimes they committed against Jews and others even if they “set their watches forward and pull down the “Hitlerstrasse street signs.”

“Germany’s crimes,” Ehrenbourg pointed out, “cannot be obliterated by pushing the clock forward. The world now knows that the Germans killed six million Jews. They killed all Jews – from infants at the breast to the aged. Until quite recently, dragging out their sadistic plensure, the Germans kept the last thousand living Jews near Elbing. Here there were architects from prague, a composer from Amsterdam, doctors from Kovno, a professor from Belgrade. They were set naked on stools in the midwinter frost, and icy waters poured over them. Then they were killed.

“Do the Germans think it is enough to take down street signs for these atrocities to be forgotten?” the article asks, “They come and swear: “We knew nothing about it, we are innocent. But the evidence is there.”