Public Prosecutor N.J.G. Sikkel today disclosed that Jewish leaders Dr. Abraham Asscher and Prof. David E. Cohen, who were arrested last week, are being held on charges of having facilitated the deportation of Dutch Jews by the Nazis.
Sikkel told the official Dutch news agency Aneta that Asscher, who is 88 years old and was known in pre-war days as the “grand old man” of Dutch Jewry, and Cohen, who is a professor at Amsterdam University, obeyed Nazi directives to register all Jews in the Netherlands, although they knew that the Germans planned to deport Jews to death camps. The two headed the National Jewish Council, which was established by the Germans to transmit their orders to the Jewish community.
The prosecutor said that an investigation into the conduct of both Cohen and Asscher, who were among the most prominent leaders of Dutch Jewry, had been in progress for many months and was still continuing. He alleged, however, that the information already uncovered made it impossible to leave them at large any longer
(A statement issued in New York today by the International League for the Rights of Man, and released through the American Civil Liberties Union, said that the League was appointing observers to attend the trial, opening on Thursday, of Frederik Weinreb, a Dutch Jew charged with having betrayed many of his co-religionists to the Germans after having collected money from them presumably to aid them to ## the country. Jewish groups, including the American Jewish Congress, have charged that Weinreb is being framed to cover up the collaborationist activities of Dutch authorities.)
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