Dutch multimillionaire art collector Pieter Menten, 78, was sentenced today by a special war crimes tribunal of the Amsterdam District Court to 15 years in prison for having participated in the mass murder of 20 to 30 persons, mainly Jews in the Polish village of Podhorodze in July 1941. The court did not find conclusive evidence of Menten’s participation in the mass murder in the nearby village of Uryce on Aug. 27, 1941, although it did not exclude his participation. The villages are now in the Soviet Union.
The public prosecutor had demanded a life sentence. The trial took 26 sessions and is the longest trial in Dutch history. Menten and his lawyer, Louis van Heyningen, have maintained that the charges against Menten are part of a Soviet conspiracy for which they used agents in Holland and elsewhere in the free world. The court rejected this claim.
The court was presided over by Johan A. Schroeder, whose reading of the verdict took nearly two hours. The Menten trial received unprecedented publicity in the Dutch press. Menten can appeal to the Supreme Court within a fortnight.
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.
