Sonny Decision to Seek Unqualified Abolition of Statute Faces Uncertain Future

A West German Government decision to abolish the statute of limitations on Nazi war crimes without any qualifications faced heavy parliamentary sledding today, raising the question of whether effective legislation would emerge.

The Cabinet decided last month to ask the Parliament to abolish the statute and thus permit continued investigation and new prosecutions of Nazi war criminals on murder charges after Dec. 31. The Cabinet also voted to allow Parliament to consider amendments which would, in effect, block further action against Nazis who had committed murder on orders or had abetted murders. Minister of Justice Horst Ehmke, chief advocate of abolition of the statute of limitations, opposed attempts to permit watering down of the measure.

Chancellor Kurt George Kissinger, who voted in the Cabinet to abolish the statute, went along with the parliamentary faction of the Christian Democratic Union, which he needs, in support of an amendment which would differentiate between “major” and “minor” Nazi killers. The Government proposals will come before the Bundestag, the Lower House, probably next week, when the Christian Democrats will seek amendment to make this differentiation.

Some German newspapers have asserted that this amendment would virtually mean a total amnesty for Nazi war criminals who have not already been indicted. The Christian Democrats were reluctant to come out for abolition of the statute and most Conservative elements in Germany would like to see the war crimes trials ended and a curtain drawn over that era of the past. The Christian Democrats have also been described as fearful that their support of abolition would send many conservative and right-wing Germans into the extremist camp of the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (ND).

(The New York Times editorially declared today that Chancellor Kissinger had bowed to conservative pressure. It said that while it was not clear what effect his action would have on the coalition with the Social Democrats, “the impact outside Germany is all too predictable. Instead of a clean-cut decision to go on prosecuting all Nazi criminals for as long as required. Bonn now seems headed for a tortuous and divisive Bundestag wrangle about which Nazis should be let off.”)

Independently of action on Nazi war crimes, the Bundestag had voted to abolish the statute of limitations on crimes of genocide and to extend from 20 to 30 years application of the statute to general murder.