A strong protest against leniency for Nazi war criminals and attempts to whitewash them was lodged here today by the Association of Former Jewish Deportees from France. The group referred specifically to last week’s acquittal of a Nazi judge, Hans-Joachim Rehse, who had passed death sentences on more than 200 political prisoners in Germany during World War II. They called on France and world opinion to halt “this process of Nazi rehabilitation.” The Association announced that it will organize a mass meeting at Pere La chaise, the central cemetery of Paris next Sunday to “honor the memory of the dead” and to call for the continued prosecution of Nazi war criminals.
(In Kiel, the interior minister of Schleswig-Holstein said today that Rehse was assured of receiving at least 50 percent of his pension from the state.)
(In West Berlin, more than 5,000 took part in a weekend demonstration against the acquittal of Rehse. They bore placards contrasting the acquittal of a Nazi judge who had imposed 231 death sentences and the sentence of a year’s imprisonment on a woman who had slapped Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger.)
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