German Parliament Establishes Special Indemnification Committee

Two proven friends of adequate indemnification for individual victims of Nazism, Dr. Otto-Heinrich Greve of the Social Democratic Party and Prof. Franz Boehm of the Christian Democratic Union, have been chosen for the top positions of the newly-created Bundestag Committee On Indemnification Matters.

Dr. Greve, the committee chairman, is a 47-year-old attorney who as a student battled the rising Nazis ##de in the ranks of the militantly republican “Reichsbanner” organization and served as a leader of the youth movement of the liberal German Democratic Party, later renamed “German State Party.” He carved out a career for himself as an industrial executive when he, although a doctor of law, was not admitted to the bar during the Nazi regime.

Professor Boehm was elected to the Committee’s deputy chairmanship two days after his sixtieth birthday. A specialist in cartel law whose academic career was cut short by the Nazis, he headed the German delegation to the reparations negotiations with Israel at The Hague in 1952 and last year visited the Jewish state. He is dauntless fighter for the redressing of Nazi injustice and his party’s foremost expert on the complexities of indemnification legislation.

The Social Democratic members of the 17-man committee include Jeanette Wolff, one of the most active Jewish communal workers in Germany who was herself dragged through Nazi jails and concentration camps for many years, and Jakob Altmaier, the only other Bundestag deputy to identify himself with the Jewish community. All bills dealing with compensation and restitution will in the future be discussed by this committee and then, with its recommendations, go directly to the floor of the House.