A decision of the parliamentary group of Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger’s Christian Democratic Union to oppose total abolition of the statute of limitations on prosecution of Nazi war murderers raised the possibility today that the proposal, which was approved last month by the West German Cabinet, may fail to obtain a majority in the lower house, the Bundestag. Should that happen, no action would be taken and the statute would automatically take effect next Dec. 31.
The parliamentary group agreed at a meeting last night that there should be a distinction made between major and minor Nazi war criminals–those who committed crimes on their own volition and those who carried them out on orders. The Chancellor supported that position and told his fellow party members that this distinction should be the official attitude of the CDU, a stand which would mean a CDU vote in the Bundestag against total abolition.
The Chancellor, who a year ago had pledged to seek total abolition of the statute and who later changed his mind, failed to win his point at the Cabinet meeting which voted for complete abolition. The Cabinet agreed with the view of Justice Minister Horst Emhke that it was impossible to decide without trials which former Nazis had been guilty of wartime murders.
Meanwhile, new forecasts of electoral gains for the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party were made by chairman Adolf Von Thadden, who said that party morale had benefited from the “debacle” of the rejection by the West German Cabinet of a proposal by Interior Minister Ernst Benda that the NPD be banned. He said another factor had been the “positive response” to the first NPD election newspaper which he asserted had a distribution of more than 15 million copies. He predicted that the NPD had “good reason” to expect to win 40 seats in the September Bundestag elections. Such a gain, it was noted, could prevent formation of a coalition between the Social Democrats and the small Free Democratic Party while it would deny an overall majority to the CDU.
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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.
