West German courts “have upheld the Gestapo” and have carried such practice a step further by showing disinclination to take any measures to compensate so-called “national persecutees” or stateless persons, unless they were Jews, the Manchester Guardian, leading British liberal newspaper, charged today. This attitude, the newspaper said, has been taken by the German courts even though the victims had “suffered equally from Nazi persecution.”
The Manchester Guardian cites as illustration the case of one Felix Kurnatovsky, 70, a former member of the Polish resistance and, during the war, editor of a Polish resistance newspaper, Kurnatovsky, who was engaged in protecting Jews, lad been arrested by the Gestapo, and imprisoned in various concentration camps. He has filed claims for compensation on the grounds that he had opposed the Nazis on “national and religious grounds, ” asserting that his imprisonment had resulted in serious injury to his health, reducing his ability to earn a livelihood.
The newspaper states that Kurnatovsky’s claim was first rejected by the Germans on the grounds that he was “only a member of the resistance movement. ” Later, a German court dismissed his claim, holding that the claims advanced by the Gestapo were valid, and are, therefore, supportable in a West German court.
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