Brooklyn District Attorney Elizabeth Holtzman called on the United Nations Monday to open to the public its more than 40,000 secret files on Nazi war criminals.
Holtzman’s call, made during a rally across the street from the UN headquarters, followed a similar official request last week by Israel’s UN Ambassador Binyamin Netanyahu in a letter to Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar.
“Sadly, the spirit of Bitburg is still still alive today,” Holtzman declared at the rally, referring to President Reagan’s visit last year to the military cemetery in Bitburg, West Germany, where members of the Waffen SS are buried. The President’s visit created an outcry in Jewish and non-Jewish communities in this country and abroad.
‘THE SPIRIT OF BITBURG LIVES ON’
“The Kurt Waldheim affair — the indifference, and even support, of world leaders over his Nazi past and his 40 year cover-up of it — shows that the spirit of Bitburg lives on,” Holtzman declared.
She said the fact that Waldheim finished first in Austria’s Presidential elections Tuesday, shows that “Austrians have given a wanted Nazi war criminal the opportunity to be elected to lead their country.” She added: “Even more appalling has been the reaction of many world leaders. West German Chancellor (Helmut) Kohl, the architect of Bitburg, has spoken in Waldheim’s defense, calling those who criticized Waldheim’s war-time service arrogant.”
DEMANDS WALDHEIM BE BARRED FROM THE U.S.
Menachem Rosensaft, founding chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, also denounced Kohl for publicly defending Waldheim as “a great patriot.”
“One year after Kohl and President Reagan honored the memory of dead Nazi soldiers at Bitburg,” Rosensaft declared, “Kohl is paying public tribute to a living former Nazi officer who has been exposed as a proven liar and an accused war criminal.”
“Today,” Rosensaft said, “we demand that Waldheim be barred from entering the U.S. regardless of whether or not he is elected President of Austria.”
Ayall Schanzer, the U.S. chairman of the North American Jewish Students’ Network, announced that his organization is undertaking an international campaign to divert Waldheim’s $100,000 annual UN pension to several groups of Jewish and non-Jewish survivors of Nazi brutality in Greece and Yugoslavia, where the former Secretary General served during World War II.
Meanwhile, Israeli and UN officials said that a reply to Israel’s request that the UN “take immediate steps necessary to insure free access of the general public” to the secret files on Nazi war criminals, might take “some time” because a decision involves more than 18 member-governments of the now defunct UN War Crimes Commission which compiled the files on the more than 40,000 war criminals.
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