The Prime Minister’s Office issued a call today for witness to help a German war veteran who was interned in the Dachau concentration camp by the Nazis for refusing to obey orders to kill Jews.
The veteran, Franz Preissler, now living in East Germany, needs affidavits to obtain a pension as a war invalid and made the request for help in a letter to Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. The veteran wrote that he was court martialed for disobeying the order to kill Jews while in service in Poland. As a Christian, he conducted himself as a human being and refused to obey, he wrote.
In his letter, he enclosed a letter from Dr. Kari Schimmer, now living in New York, and from Hans Kronoski, now in Leipzig, both of whom affirmed that Preissler was in Dachau in 1943 and 1944 and that helped many Jews escape death. His request for affidavits from Israeli survivors was sent to the Yad Vashem, the Israel Center for Documentation of the Hitler holocaust, for dissemination.
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