Heated scenes took place in the Prussian Parliament to-day when the social Democratic Party put up Deputy Kuttner, who is a Jew, to oppose a motion introduced by the Nazi Party for proclaiming an amnesty, to release persons serving terms of imprisonment for what were described as terrorist acts.
If the amnesty motion is carried, he said, many Nazis would be released who have been sentenced, some to as much as 12 years imprisonment. We believe that no civilised State should allow murder, pillage, arson and desecration of the Houses of God, and of cemeteries, to go unpunished.
Much more important than an amnesty for people convicted of acts of violence, Deputy Kuttner went on, would be an amnesty for people who have committed crimes as a result of the terrible economic distress to which they have fallen victims. These people have a claim to our sympathy, but we are opposed to a law which will take political terrorists under its wing.
The Nazi Deputies tried to shout down Deputy Kuttner, and their spokesman, Deputy Dr. Freisler, in his reply, taunted him with his Jewish origin, and said that the Nazis regarded it as an act of provocation that the Social Democrats had put up as their spokesman a Jew, and a man who had shot one of our German brothers".
The reference is to the revolutionary civil war, when Deputy Kuttner was proceeded against for having shot dead a worker, but the court found that he had shot in self-defence, and he was acquitted.
We Nazis will insist, Deputy Freisler said, that wherever one of foreign race is poisoning the minds of our German people, the legal actions in which they have been concerned must be reopened. The previous decisions of the law courts will not be considered by us as final. No one has yet dared to fix the responsibility for his crime on Deputy Kuttner, but we shall do it.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
