Indirect assistance to the neo-Nazi parties in next Sunday’s West German parliamentary elections is being provided in East Germany by continued Communist attacks on the payment of reparations by West Germany to Israel.
Opening the famed Leipzig Fair yesterday, East German Communist Premier Otto Grotewohl denounced the agreement to pay Israel reparations on the grounds that it called for payment to a “country which suffered no war damage whatever.” Premier Grotewohl added that the Jewish people in Israel were not entitled to any form of compensation.
Earlier this week-end, Walter Ulbricht, head of the Socialist Unity Party of East Germany, its Deputy Minister-President and the most powerful figure in Communist Germany, made a demand for the immediate cessation of German reparations payments to Israel. Speaking in the presence of Vladimir Semenov. Soviet High Commissioner for Germany. Ulbricht told a mass rally in the Soviet sector of Berlin that a unified Germany should denounce all German prewar and postwar debts and that West Germany should refuse to pay all reparations.
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.
