British Labor Party leader Aneuran Bevan asked in Commons today what steps were being taken by the British Government to ensure early compensation from the West German Government for British citizens who had suffered Nazi persecution and for concentration camp victims who were now political refugees in Britain. Mr. Bevan charged that they were being denied compensation in defiance of commitments of the West German Republic in the Bonn convention.
John D. Profumo, Minister of State, replied that the British Government had opened discussions with the West German Government. Mr. Bevan pressed the issue by asking: “Have not these discussions been going on for some time and are not these people being very badly treated indeed?” Pointing out that “many years have gone by,” he asked: “Was there not a strict undertaking in the Bonn Convention of 1952 and repeated afterwards in 1955 that this category of refugees should be sympathetically considered? So far,” he asserted, “they have not been.”
Mr. Profumo agreed that the settlement was taking “a long time.” He added he hoped that the present talks would achieve a settlement. The West German Federal Government, he said, was “in no doubt about the importance we attach to this matter.”
John Hall, Conservative Member of Parliament, asked whether Mr. Profumo was aware that certain German doctors disbarred by the West German medical profession for their participation in medical experiments on prisoners during World War II were now returning to medical practice with the permission of their medical authorities. The Minister of State replied that this involved “a wider question” which he “preferred not to answer.”
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