(NEWS) , Happ?:!-:la,r,lukkah Report Says Britain Welcomed SS Officers HELEN DAVIS Special to The Jewish News From the Delta family to your family, here's wishing you a joyous holiday. And if you're gathering together during the Festival of Lights, remember that Delta and The Delta Connection° serve over 240 cities worldwide. ADELTA 14kLove768/AndItShows: Delta Connection flights operate with Delta flight numbers 2000-5999. © 1988 Delta Air Lines, Inc. KICK OFF RALLY & PRESS CONFERENCE Thursday, December 8th 7:30 p.m. JEWISH COMMUNITY CENTER West Bloomfield Michigan Region • 4... 0.• ■••••- •••• ■ • • 44, .14, • 'at. • • COIN JEWELRY ... All sizes and styles to meet everyone's budget! 0. COIN AND BEZEL STARTING AT $85 \ i, ALSO GOLD CHAINS BY WEIGHT. • ire/ Alikb ,f, '*. (Pi ti14 q "FACTORY TO YOU SAVINGS" Y fC\ 0 ,,.* ttA\ v 1/4 1 . 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The non-partisan parlia- mentary group, which presented its report last week, was formed to inquire into the immigration of col- laborators and war criminals following allegations by the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center that alleg- ed war criminals were living in Britain. According to one of the legislators, Greville Janner, a leading member of the Bri- tish Jewish community and honorary secretary of the group, literally thousands of members of the Waffen SS — notorious for wartime atro- cities — settled in Britain. Moreover, he said, the govern- ment "did not give a damn." Taken together, the report —which is based on recently declassified cabinet docu- ments, parliamentary reports as well as letters and memo- randa between civil servants —paints a picture of a British government that indulged in an extraordinary level of hypocrisy, insensitivity and duplicity. It shows that while Britain was refusing to allow Jewish death camp survivors into Palestine and blocking their immigration to Britain, some 90,000 Ukranians, Latvians, Yugoslays and ethnic Ger- mans, many of whom had been members of the SS, were permitted to enter the coun- try almost indiscriminately between 1945 and 1950. According to the report, the British government deliber- ately ignored the background of thousands of Nazi war criminals and collaborators because it was anxious to recruit scientists, sources of intelligence and laborers for its mines and farms. "The examination of Bri- tish labor recruitment policy," notes the report, "has reveal- ed an often willful neglect of elementary political and sec- urity checks." An example of this attitude was contained in a memoran- dum written in January 1947 by a Foreign Office official who expressed concern that before too long "other coun- tries will have skimmed the cream of the displaced per- sons, especially the Balts who are undoubtedly the elite of the refugees." Indeed, thousands of former SS men from the Baltic republics were recruited and brought to Britain in an operation code-named "West- ward Ho." Among these were former concentration camp guards and members of the einsatzgruppen mobile death squads. At the time, Lord Jowitt, then lord chancellor — effec- tively the most senior legal figure in Britain — conceded that several hundred German — "I am willing to risk their being Nazis — and I think they probably are as long as they are highly skilled technicians who will teach our people something which they previously did not know." scientists who entered Bri- tain had highly questionable war records. Many, it was alleged, had spent the war working for German firms which used concentration camp inmates as slave labor. Lord Jowitt was unmoved: "I am willing to risk their being Nazis — and I think they probably are — as long as they are highly skilled technicians who will teach our people something which they previously did not know," he said in the House of Lords. According to the report, one group of Latvians was allow- ed to settle in Britain as miners precisely because they had been members of the SS. This led to some embarrass- ment when their British col- leagues objected to working alongside men who carried under their arms the tell-tale swastika tattoo of the SS. The National Coal Board, the state body which admini- stered the mines, immediate- ly ordered that the Latvians be transferred to tasks which would not require them to remove their shirts. On another occasion, pro- tests were raised over noisy SS reunions held by a group of Ukranians. The response of the Foreign Office in London Continued on Page 74