The West German Federal law to indemnify victims of the Nazis, whose passage was pledged in the German agreement with Israel and the Jewish Claims Conference, will be passed before the Parliamentary elections this summer, Dr. Otto Kuester, director of the Baden-Wuerttemberg Department of Indemnification and Reparations, declared here today.
The former deputy chief of the German negotiations team at The Hague conferences on reparations said that the law had been given top priority by the Bundestag (Lower House of Parliament) Legal Committee and that the committee would redouble its efforts in behalf of the bill’s adoption.
Dr. Kuester is generally credited with blasting the log-jam at the reparations conference by his resignation as deputy chief to Prof. Franz Boehm, head of the German negotiators. At the time he resigned he made a public statement on the German radio denouncing members of the Bonn Cabinet who were attempting to sabotage and delay the reaching of a reparations agreement. Shortly after his blast the negotiations were speeded up by the Germans.
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