Charges by Rabbi Joachim Prinz, president of the American Jewish Congress, all eging that the United States Government is not permitting access to documentation on Nazi war criminals, were denied a second time here this weekend.
Dr. Prinz, who returned from a visit to Germany and West Berlin two weeks ago, made those charges against the U.S. Government after his return, speaking as chairman of the Conference of Major American Jewish Organizations. Denied immediately by the State Department, Dr. Prinz made public further allegations that the American Jewish Congress, the World Jewish Congress and a group of students at the Free University of West Berlin had not been allowed access to Nazi crimes documentation held by the U.S.A. in West Berlin and at Alexandria, Va.
This weekend, Robert J. McCloskey, the State Department press officer, declared: “It is nonsense to say that the U.S. Government has hampered the task of bringing Nazi criminals to justice.” He said that “various private Jewish organizations have had access to these documents.” and insisted that “qualified German agencies” have received U.S. cooperation both at the West Berlin Documentation Center and at Alexandria.
“Almost 80 percent of all captured German documents stored at the Alexandria Center,” he said, “have already been returned to Germany.” Asserting that the German investigators could get all the information they needed at the two documentation centers, he added: “Only very few of the documents are still secret and not opened to scholarly and civic agencies and news media because they contain classified military information.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
