A delegation of 19 American Jewish leaders and representatives of the Catholic Church, the National Council of Churches (NCC) and civil rights groups yesterday asked West German Ambassador Berndt von Staden to urge his government to continue the prosecution of Nazi war criminals as “a moral obligation and a warning to neo-Nazis all over the world.”
The meeting between the delegation and von Staden was under the auspices of the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council (NJCRAC) and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. The delegation, led by Theodore Mann, chairman of NJCRAC and the Conference of Presidents, declared that “the mere passage of time is not enough to wipe the slate clean for these war criminals still not brought to justice.” The meeting was in conjunction with the worldwide move asking the Bonn government not to allow the law which permits it to try war criminals to expire Dec. 31.
Following the half-hour meeting with von Staden, two members of the delegation said that the issue transcends Jews and Christians and involves all humanity. Mann told reporters that a procedural fact should not be permitted to allow a single Nazi war criminal to remain free. “This is a moral issue of the first magnitude,” he said. “That is the feeling, I believe, of all America.”
A MORAL ISSUE FOR HUMANITY
Dr. William Weiler, executive director of the Office of Christian-Jewish Relations of the NCC, told reporters “It is not a Jewish and not a Christian issue. This a moral issue that confronts all people of good will.” He said he hoped the time limit “will be abolished and the West German government prosecutes with all vigor all Nazis.”
The delegation asked the West German government to extend the statute of limitations “in memory of the 11 million innocent people murdered including the six million Jews, but also in the name of current and future generations of Germans who will at least be able to say that their country did all it could to atone for the tragic years of the Hitler regime.”
The delegation also requested that the West German Justice Ministry accelerate its efforts of investigation, apprehension and trial of war criminals. Many of the cases, it said, have dragged on for years. Mann told von Staden that the manifestations of neo-Nazism in West Germany and elsewhere “make it all the more imperative” to extend the time limit” lest these forces be encouraged to try again.”
He noted the number of West Germans who, contrary to claims that they wish to forget the Nazi years, viewed the NBC-TV “Holocaust” series which was broadcast last month in West Germany: “Many of them,” Mann said, “were young people who learned for the first time the nature and enormity of the Nazi crimes and asked why they had not been told about them in their schools.”
BACKGROUND OF STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS
Von Staden pointed out to the delegation that the statute of limitations, in the West German criminal code since 1851, has a 20 year time limit for murder and other capital crimes. This time limit was extended by 10 years in 1969 and is due to expire at the end of this year unless there is a new act by the German Parliament.
(According to a recent background paper by the American Jewish Committee, the original West German law for prosecution of Nazi war criminals envisaged a halt to such prosecution in 1965; 20 years after the end of World War II. Worldwide protests by Jews and non-Jews then resulted in a Bonn decision to start the 20-year count not from 1945 but from 1949, when the Federal Republic was established, making 1969 the new cut-off date.
(In 1968, the background paper noted, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity. The wording, however, was unacceptable to West Germany and to most European and American countries. In 1969, further world pressure resulted in an additional 10-year extension of the statute of limitations, making the deadline Dec. 31, 1979.)
Among those in the delegation were three survivors of the Nazi death camps Ernest Michel executive vice president of the United Jewish Appeal of Greater New York, who was imprisoned in Auschwitz and Buchenwald; John Fox, vice president of the Philadelphia Jewish Community Relations Council, who survived Buchenwald and Dachau and Abraham Foxman, associate director of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, who was saved from the Nazis in Poland by a Catholic nursemaid who claimed he was her baby, after his parents were taken to concentration camps.
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