The West German Cabinet this week-end cleared the way for Parliamentary action on a comprehensive bill to indemnify hundreds of thousands of victims of Nazism, most of them Jews, by approving the draft of a measure worked out by its legal and financial experts. The measure calls for the payment of damages totaling some 4,000,000,000 marks ($952,000, 000).
The bill is scheduled to be submitted to the Bundestag–the upper house–which is not likely to take it up before June 19. If it wins approval in the Bundestag, it must then win approval in three separate readings in the Bundestag, after which it is to be returned to the upper house for final endorsement and enactment into law.
Since Parliament will probably adjourn on July 3 and may not reconvene before a new Bundestag is elected in the fall, observers here fear that the government’s action may have come too late for completion of the complicated legislative process in the current Parliamentary session. A government spokesman refused to guess whether the legislation would be passed before July .3.
Both the West German Government and Chancellor Adenauer have repeatedly undertaken to expedite the passage of an indemnification law. Its introduction in this present state a little more than a month before Parliament’s adjournment may be too late to do justice to the claims of tens of thousands of Nazi victims who for more than eight years have been waiting for some compensation for damages suffered at the hands of the Nazis.
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