Many Balkan refugees who are ex-Nazis now live in the United States, and in Canada where they, and especially Ukrainian “intelligentsia” are powerful, Simon Wiesenthal, founder and head of the Nazi-hunting Documentation-Center in Vienna, reported yesterday at a meeting with Jewish leaders and the press at the Jewish Agency.
Small groups of Nazis, members of “Kamradenburg,” which succeeded “Odessa” in 1961 as the organization assisting ex-Nazis, work in the capital cities of South America and maintain good relations with the German and Austrian Embassies, Wiesenthal said. Other former Nazis are to be found in the army and police of Egypt, in Syrian intelligence groups, in the East German government and newspapers, in the Austrian and Polish governments, and in Spain, he asserted.
Wiesenthal, whose organization is now handling some 330 cases, emphasized that Jewish leaders should publicize the fact that the Holocaust was not solely a Nazi-Jewish problem. Millions of non-Jews, he asserted, were slaughtered behind the smoke screen of the Jewish problem.
Calling himself “not only the bad conscience of Nazis, but of Jews as well,” Wiesenthal said, “I refuse to work only for Jews….We Jews reduce the whole problem to a struggle between the Nazis and the Jews and in this way we have lost many friends.” He urged that the Jewish community demand continuation of trials of ex-Nazis because “the trials more than the sentences have educational value for…youth.”
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.
