President of West Germany Takes Note of Complaints on Compensation

President Theodor Heuss of West Germany last night took note of complaints about the inadequacy of the German compensation programs for victims of Nazism and admitted that the program was “makeshift” though he asserted that the Bonn Government and Parliament regarded the problem as of “paramount” human and political concern. The President is on a four-day visit of state to Britain.

No one would dream of “belittling” the terrible things which have happened in Germany, the German President declared. Germany, he continued, knew it was her duty to make amends, but compensation would always be a makeshift, a piecemeal task. He said there were still 2,250,000 compensation claims outstanding.

President Heuss today spent 30 minutes browsing through the Wiener Library, a specialized collection of 50,000 books and 200,000 clippings and references pertaining to Nazism, Fascism and Jewish sufferings under these regimes. The anti-Nazi President was given the warmest reception he has yet had in Britain by a large group of former German Jews, employes of the library and its director and president, Dr. Alfred Wiener and Leonard Montefiore. The President remarked to an aide that “today is the first time I felt at home.”

Prof. Heuss looked up his own name on a secret Gestapo list of “unpatriotic Germans” and spent some time examining the portrait of Dr. Konrad Adenauer, currently Chancellor of West Germany, which appeared in a 1933 Nazi volume as a photograph of “Cologne’s Jewish Mayor.” The President showed himself as thoroughly informed on the suffering of the Jews under the Nazis.