Newspaper Page Text
Menten to undergo
second crimes trial
by Hmritdt Boas
AMSTERDAM (JTA)-The
second trial of Pieter Menten,
whose first conviction and
sentence on war crimes charges
was quashed by the Supreme
Court in 1978, opened this week in
a Rotterdam district court.
Witnesses from Israel, Poland, the
Soviet Union and the United
States are expected to testify
against him.
Menten's new trial is the
culmination of two years of
tortuous legal maneuverings by the
defense and prosecution in which
rulings by one court were
overturned by another. But the 80-
year-old millionaire Dutch-born
art dealer who served with the Nazi
SS during World War II still
stands accused of mass murders,
mostly of Jews, in Podhorodze
village in the Lemberg district of
Poland in July 1941.
An Amsterdam district court
found him guilty on that charge in
December 1977 and sentenced him
to 15 years imprisonment. He was
acquitted of charges of mass
murder in Urycz village. Although
the court considered his guilt
probable, there was insufficient
evidence for conviction.
Menten appealed to the
Supreme Court which threw out
the Amsterdam verdict and
referred the case to The Haeue
because of immunity allegedly
granted him in 1952 by the then
Minister of Justice, since deceased.
The public prosecutor appealed in
turn to the Supreme Court which
then referred the case to the
Rotterdam court.
Menten produced medical
evidence that he was mentally unfit
to stand trial. This was upheld by a
vote of 2-1 by a special panel of
doctors. But the Rotterdam court
subsequently overruled that
finding. Menten has been under
house arrest for the past two years
at his country villa. His original
lawyer, Louis van Heyningen, has
resigned and the court appointed a
new defense attorney, Eduard
Boehl. The public prosecutor, Leo
Meyers, has called 13 witnesses
and three expert witnesses, all but
one of whom had testified at the
first trial. Menten asked for 120
witnesses to be heard in his defense
but the court limited that to 30.
The lSouth*
Israelite
VOL. LVI
The Weekly Newspaper for Southern Jewry
Our 56th Year
Atlanta, Georgia, Friday, May 16, 19M
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World tribunal as
Shcharansky release
by Henriette Boas
AMSTERDAM (JTA)—An
international tribunal convening
here found the Soviet Union guilty
of a grave miscarriage of justice in
the imprisonment of Anatoly
Shcharansky and called on it to
release the Jewish activist who was
sentenced in 1977 to 13 years in jail
for alleged espionage and anti-
Soviet activities.
The ll-member panel,
composed of distinguished jurists,
diplomats, political and civil rights
leaders from many countries,
reached its unanimous verdict
Tuesday after a two-day review of
the evidence in the Shcharansky
case. The tribunal was chaired, by
and that’ those who had Andrew Young, former' U.S.
aliSd'o?'' to t^e "Unite j
On the first day of his trial,
Menten denied that there ever was
a mass execution at Podhorodze or
that he had helped shoot the
victims or bashed in their skulls.
He claimed, as he had at his first
trial, that the charges against him
were a Communist plot engineered
by the Soviet Union. He alleged
that the investigators had failed to
find any reliable witnesses against
him
Its members included Coretta
King, widow of Martin Luther
King Jr.; former U.S. Attorney
General Ramsay Clark; Rep.
Robert Drinan(D. Mass ), a Jesuit
priest active on behalf of Soviet
Jewry; Mario Soares, former
premier of Portugal; Johan den
Uyl, former prime minister of The
Netherlands; and George
Fernandes, former minister of
Transport and Industry in India.
McGill University law professor
Irwin Cotier, legal counsel to
Shcharansky, served as his
representative before the tribunal.
At the opening session,
Shcharansky’s wife, Avital, made
an impassioned appeal for the life
of her husband pnd for all
»*«£**"•'* *
was an anti-Soviet forum that was
inciting to “cold war” and would
cause a deterioration in relations
between East and West. Harry van
den Bergh, a Labor member of the
Dutch Parliament, told a press
conference here last week that the
charge was “nonsense."
Van den Bergh said that he met
twice with the Soviet ambassador,
Vassili Tolstikow, in his capacity
as chairman of the “Friends of
Anatoly Shcharansky Committee,"
to discuss human rights in generkf
and the Shcharansky case in
particular. He said Tolstikow
rejected a request to send a Soviet
representative to the tribunal and
also refused to make available a
copy of the sentence handed down
on Shcharansky.
Van den Bergh said he
considered the invectives by
Novosty, which publishes news
outside the Soviet Union, to be a
sign that Moscow is sensitive on
this issue. He said the tribunal was
not organized as an anti-Soviet
demonstration but to call attention
to the violation of human rights in
the USSR.
Autonomy talks may
resume near future?
indication that the next
negotiating session can take place
at an early date.
“I understand President Carter
asked President Sadat to make a
quick decision to reconvene the
peace negotiations with Israel and
President Sadat assured our
president—President Carter—that
he would do so,“ Reston added.
Reston said he had no specific
date when the negotiations would
be resumed. Reston ruled out a
Cairo report that Sadat, Carter
and Israeli Prime Minister
Menachim Begin would meet in
Washington .at the *nd of May.
“Nothing to it," Reston said.
by Joseph Polakoff
WASHINGTON (JTA)—The
Carter administration said
Wednesday that Egyptian
President Anwar Sadat has
indicated that the Egyptian-
Israeli-American negotiations on
autonomy for the West Bank and
Gaza would be resumed “at an
early date.”
State Department spokesman
Thomas Reston, following up on a
telephone call placed by President
Carter to Sadat on Tuesday and
Sadat's statement in Cairo
Wednesday, said: “We, of course,
are pleased at President Sadat’s
Gathering the harvest
A youngster at Tel-Yosef Kibbutz in Israel, symbolically gathers the first harvest from the fields,
during an earlier Sbavuot celebration. Known as the “Festival of the Giving of the Torah." Shavuot is
observed this year on May 21-22.