Ernst Achenbach, a member of the Free Democratic Party (FDP). blamed for blocking ratification of the Franco-German treaty which would permit Germany to retry Nazi war criminals convicted in absentia in France, has announced he will resign from the Bundestag committee considering the treaty. “I have now decided to ask another (committee) colleague to take over so that the emotion should be taken from the whole thing,” Achenbach said in a television interview last night.
Members of the FDP have been calling for Achenbach’s removal from the Foreign Affairs Committee and even from the parliament since he appeared on French television urging amnesty for Nazi criminals. The spotlight was turned on the German failure to ratify the treaty and Achenbach’s part in blocking it after Nazi hunter Beate Klarsfeld was found guilty of trying to abduct Kurt Lischka, who was Gestapo chief of Paris during World War II and trying to bring him to France. Achenbach now 65, was a Nazi diplomat in the German Embassy in Paris during the war.
Achenbach said that as a lawyer he knows that 30 years after the Nazi crimes, “trials are practically impossible to conduct when the intention is a just sentence.” He explained that “on the average, half the witnesses are dead, a quarter remember absolutely nothing and the other quarter do remember, but it is very doubtful if the recollections are right.”
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