ATTACK ON MR VYSHINSKY

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27213, 3 December 1953, Page 11

ATTACK ON MR VYSHINSKY

Testimony Of Latvian Exile

(Rec. 8 p.m.) WASHINGTON. Dec. 1. Alfred Berzins, a former member of the Latvian Cabinet, said today that n$ knew from personal experience that Mr Andrei Vyshinsky, now the Soviet delegate to the United Nations, was the greatest murderer in this world and the greatest of liars.” Mr Berzins, who was Minister for Public Affairs in Latvia when the Soviet Union seized the country in 1940, was testifying before the special House of Representatives Committee investigating the methods by which the Soviet Union took over the Baltic ania° nS ° f Latvia ’ Esth o n ia» and Lithudenounced as “all lies” Mr Vyshinsky’s statement in the United Nations General Assembly on December 4 last year that the people of the three Baltic States joined the Soviet Union- voluntarily and had prospered as a result. He said that Mr Vyshinsky "masterminded the ruthless Communist enslavement of his country. In a voice filled with emotion, Mr Berztns said: I have experienced. Don’t believe one word this man utters,” Mr Berzins, who escaped the Communists only to spend 32 months in solitary confinement in a Nazi concentration camp, said Mr Vyshinsky appeared in Riga, the Latvian capital, along with Communist troops and

handed the Free Latvian President. Mr Karlis Ulmanis, a list of men to be installed as a temporary puppet government. He said that Mr Vyshinsky was personally responsible for the deportation and murder of hundreds of thousands of Latvians. He said his own wife and children were deported to Siberia in June. 1941, and he had not heard from them since.