The Justice Ministry rejected charges today that it was too easy on nee-Nazis and right-wing extremists who glorify the Third Reich, spread anti-Jewish propaganda and claim the Holocaust never took place. The Ministry said that a study of 20 recent cases showed that there were more convictions than commonly assumed and that sentences ranged from a 300 Mork fine to two years in jail.
At the same time, the Justice Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia announced a full pardon for anti-Nazi fighter Beate Klarsfeld. She received a two-month jail sentence in Cologne in 1974 for inflicting bodily harm and duress on former SS security officer Kurt Lischka who was the Gestapo chief in Paris during World War II.
Lischka has been accused of responsibility for the murder of at least 22,000 French Jews. Mrs. Klarsfeld, 40, and several French friends, attempted to drag him into a car in 1971 to bring him to France for trial. The kidnapping failed and Mrs. Klarsfeld, who returned to France, was tried and sentenced by a Cologne court in absentia.
An arrest warrant against her was suspended after angry criticism of the sentence abroad. The procedure for a pardon was initiated by West German legal authorities on the basis of an appeal by prominent German and French citizens, among them President Valery Giscord d’Estaing of France. Klarsfeld said at the time that the kidnapping was on attempt to focus world-wide attention on Lischka and the fact that many war criminals were still at large in West Germany. She said she had hoped it would prompt the West German authorities to bring the former Gestapo chief to trial.
THOUSANDS OF NAZI PAMPHLETS DISTRIBUTED
While the Bundestag is debating the abolition or extension of the statute of limitations for the prosecution of Nazi war criminals yet to be apprehended, the extent of neo-Nazi activities was indicated in the Justice Ministry’s list of recent indictments.
The offenses included distribution of propaganda material by illegal organizations; libeling the State and its institutions glorifying violence or inciting racial hatred; wearing the swastika or other Nazi symbols which is illegal under the law; and glorifying, Hitler and the Nazi regime. Sentences were meted out to persons arrested for distributing. leaflets urging Germans not to buy from Jews and for publishing pro-Nazi pamphlets.
An excerpt from such a pamphlet cited by the Justice Ministry, said: “Lies, mostly written by Jews, have been pouted all over the globe for the past 30 years. What did Adolf Hitler really want? He intended to lead the German people out of poverty and need, break the chains of the Versailles Treaty and give back to the Germans a human existence. The German people can now proudly confess their love for one of their greatest sons. The Germans killed six million Jews? Who believes such nonsense. West Germany is an American colony.”
The Justice Ministry said such pamphlets have been distributed by the hundreds of thousands in the past few months. Only a few were confiscated.
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