500 Nazi Camp Survivors Rally on Statute of Limitations Issue

More than 500 survivors of Nazi concentration camps, supported by various youth groups and others, picketed West Germany’s Mission to the United Nations, demanding that the Bonn government act to prevent Nazi war criminals from escaping justice. The demonstration, organized by the Survivors of Nazi Camps and Resistance Fighters, was aimed against the statute of limitations on war crimes prosecution due to take effect in West Germany Jan. 1, 1980. (See related story P. 3.)

The picketers included student delegations from Columbia University, New York University and Queens College and members of The Generation After, an organization of young adults, many of them the children of concentration camp survivors. They marched in orderly procession outside the German Mission headquarters Tuesday carrying signs which read, “No Statute of Limitations for Mass Murderers, No Amnesty for War Criminals — Not Ever”; and “We Cannot Forgive the Murderers of our Children — How Does Bonn Forgive?”

John Ranz, executive secretary of the survivors organization and himself a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, said that “Unless a law is passed in the Bonn parliament to extend the search and prosecution of war criminals, thousands of them will re-surface and be able to boast of their heinous crimes. There will be no legal action possible against them.

He said that by allowing the statute to expire as scheduled on Dec. 31, 1979, “the Bonn parliament will, in effect, issue a freedom award to mass murderers who were not discovered during the last 30 years. This, the survivors consider, would be an insult to the 11 million people of all races and religions killed in the concentration camps and an insult to all mankind.”