“cold Sabotage” of Indemnification Condemned in Bonn Parliament

Parliamentary deputies of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s Christian Democratic Union and of the Social Democratic opposition joined this week-end on the floor of the Bundestag in a strongly worded condemnation of the prevalent “cold sabotage” of indemnification for individual victims of Nazism through court decisions reflecting unmistakable anti-Jewish bias.

The heated discussion erupted during the first reading of a Social Democratic amendment to the Federal Indemnification Law, which was referred to the Bundestag’s new indemnification committee. The amendment proposed the speeding up of payments under the law and advanced the target date for completion of the program by two years.

The government bench, as has been the case in most similar instances, was empty during the debate, this time because it conflicted with a Cabinet meeting. But a Christian Democratic deputy from Berlin made it clear that Chancellor Adenauer was in full agreement with the sentiments of the House.

Indignant boos were heard from all parts of the chamber when Dr. Adolf Arndt, a Social Democrat, read aloud a number of excerpts from judicial opinions and verdicts handed down by German judges in indemnification cases. Professor Carlo Schmid, a leading Social Democrat, demanded impeachment of the judges concerned.

INSTANCES OF ANTI-JEWISH ACTION CITED IN BUNDESTAG

Dr. Arndt quoted, for instance, a finding reached by the Mannheim District Court last November that a Jewish storekeeper had been boycotted, insulted and beaten up “not because he was the Jew, Sigmund Wolffers, but simply because he was a member of the Jewish people.” The boycott of Wolffers, said the judge, was not an act of persecution that would entitle him to restitution but “merely a temporary retaliatory measure of an economic nature against German Jewry as such.” Wolffers’ flight from Germany, therefore, the court continued, was “not emigration for reasons of individual persecution, but a precautionary measure taken in anticipation of coming events.”

Last year, the government of Baden-Wuerttemberg commissioned a secret “judicial opinion” from Presiding Judge Hans Teufel of Rottweil, which it then used to justify its dismissal of Dr. Otto Kuester, the last high ranking official in the state who was willing to fight for adequate indemnification. One of the principal “accusations” against him voiced by Judge Teufel was that Dr. Kuester granted a pension to the window and minor children of an officer executed for participation in the 1944 plot against Hitler’s life. He should not have authorized the pension, the judge wrote, because the officer had “only been engaged in the saving of women and children.”

Professor Franz Boehm, of the Christian Democratic Union, in his summing up, said that unfortunately it had to be admitted that such judges could count on support from a large part of the population, since indemnification is not popular in Germany. Renazification in the Federal Republic, he added, had not made as much progress as some people believe, “but it has proceeded much further than we would like.”