Word: nazis
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After seven hours of intense debate, West Germany's Bundestag last week voted, 253 to 228, to abolish the statute of limitation on murder that would have made it impossible for the Federal Republic to prosecute newly uncovered Nazi war killers after Dec. 31. The vote was a triumph for Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and Justice Minister Hans-Jochen Vogel, who had led the parliamentary fight to lift the 30-year time limit. Said Vogel: "After Auschwitz, there can be no statute of limitation for murder in Germany...
Advocates of keeping the statute had argued that most crimes had been detected or dealt with, and that future convictions of Nazi killers would become increasingly difficult because of faulty memories, witnesses' deaths, and lack of evidence. Of the 85,802 people investigated in connection with war crimes since 1945, only 6,440 have been convicted, and only 166 received the maximum sentence of life imprisonment. Opponents of the present law were afraid that some of the several thousand Nazi criminals in hiding abroad might escape justice. There has been international pressure on the Bundestag, particularly from Jews around...
...welcomed by cascades of flowers and the joyous peal of church bells'. Vienna-born Walter Maass, who specializes in wartime history (The Netherlands at War, Assassination in Vienna), strives to explain the complexities behind that event, and Austria's increasingly reluctant role during the seven years of Nazi rule (1938-45) that followed. Country Without a Name (Austria was absorbed into Germany as an assemblage of Nazi-run districts) is a bleak, sad story...
Schmidt was a member of the Hitler Youth, but never joined the Nazi Party as an adult...
Lifton sees another, more controversial psychological device at work. Because most cultures fear dying, one way to combat that dread is to look around for an enemy that symbolizes death. For the Nazis, it was the Jews, who had long been portrayed as Christ killers. Says Lifton: "If you view the Jews as death-tainted, then killing them seems to serve life." In Lifton's eyes, those who look upon the Nazis or their medical henchmen simply as maddened sadists are on the wrong track. "Most killing is not done out of sadism, not even most Nazi killing," says...