Franz Etzel new Finance Minister of the West German Republic, disowned suggestions today of his predecessor which would have had the effect of delaying the indemnification program for victims of Nazism beyond the scheduled completion date of March 1963.
The Finance Minister assured a delegation of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany that no such plans were being considered by him or any of his aides. He added that statements that the total cost of the program was running well above five billion dollars were merely estimates whose accuracy had not yet been definitely established.
Etzel’s comments were evoked by hints from Fritz Schaeffer, the previous Finance Minister, that it might be desirable to defer completion of the program because costs were unexpectedly high.
In a related development, representatives of the Claims Conference urged leading members of the West German Bundestag to present scrapping of the Parliament’s Indemnification Committee. During the past session the committee made order out of the chaos of the Federal indemnification program, but considerable pressure was reported in the Lower House against reconstituting the committee for the current session.
Jewish representatives here feared that disappearance of the committee while two-thirds of the indemnification program remained to be implemented would be interpreted by hostile circles as a sign of lessening Adenauer administration interest in the program.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
