Peres Sees Berlin Anti-Nazi Memorial

Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, touring the city where Adolf Hitler plotted the extermination of millions of Jews, on Wednesday visited the site where the Nazi dictator’s would-be assassins were executed.

Peres stopped only briefly at the Ploetzensee memorial, at the site where Lt. Col. Klaus von Stauffenberg and his seven followers were executed for their July 20, 1944, attempt to kill Hitler with a bomb.

At the 29-mile-long Berlin Wall, which since 1961 has divided the city into a Communist eastern sector and a western part, Peres said, “Walls come, walls go, but the human spirit remains.

“We should always look to the roots (of problems) and not to the walls,” he told a crowd of dignitaries in the ornate Schoeneberg City Hall.

Peres was protected by tanks, helicopters and 4,000 police officers. A West Berlin police source, requiring anonymity, said a threat against his life had been telephoned to a news agency Tuesday night.