U.S. Jewish Groups Disappointed with Bundestag Decision

Jewish organizations expressed disappointment this weekend over the action by the Bundestag, lower house of West Germany’s Parliament, in extending the statute of limitations for the prosecution of war criminals by only four and a half years.

Dr. John Stawson, executive vice-president of the American Jewish Committee, welcomed on behalf of the AJ Committee, the extension of the deadline from May 8, 1965 to December 31, 1969, but added the organization’s “regret and disappointment” that a minimum 10-year extension had not been approved.

The decision taken by the Bundestag, said Dr. Stawson, “clearly recognizes West Germany’s continuing responsibilities to remove the vestiges of the Hitler period. At the same time we note with regret and disappointment that a minimum 10-year extension was not approved. As recently stated by our board of governors, the American Jewish Committee hopes that West Germany will continue to be vigilant against all intimations of Nazi, anti-Semitic and authoritarian ideologies. We repeat that hope today.”

The Jewish Labor Committee, in a statement by its executive secretary, Benjamin Tabachnik, also expressed its “great disappointment” over the short, new cut-off date voted by the Bundestag.” “As long as the generation of the murderers of the 6,000,000 victims of Nazism is still alive,” the statement adopted by the JLC’s presidium pledged, “Jewish workers and the Jewish people as a whole will not give up the search for the murderers and the effort to bring to justice the Nazis guilty of the mass murders.”

Dr. Max Nussbaum, chairman of the American Zionist Council, said in a statement that the Bundestag decision is a “great disappointment.” “It is enough of a gesture so as not to condemn it, but not enough of statesmanship to rejoice over it,” he said. “What the world expected from Bonn was not a move of expedience but an act of atonement. It is in the area of morality that Bonn failed us again.”