Word: von
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...even as his speeches carefully articulate the distictions between personal the guilt of the perpetrators of Nazi crimes and the collective guilt of the German nation, critics charge that von Weizsacker's own failed effort to come to terms with his family's role in the Nazi regime illustrates the inexorable instinct of people to forget a painful past...
Critics, including a Rice professor of history and Harvard Professor of Law Alan Dershowitz, claim that the younger von Weizsacker has distorted the historical record to exonerate his father. Even defenders of the German president concede that he may have a blind spot when it comes to assessing his father's role in Nazi Germany...
...Von Weizsacker father was tried by an American tribunal at Nuremberg, and sentenced to five years in prison, for assisting in the deportation of 6000 French Jews to a Nazi death camp. To this day, the younger von Weizsacker--who served among his father's lawyers at Nuremberg--insists that his father did not know that the Nazis were planning to kill those Jews who were deported...
...many Jewish leaders who praise the statesman say that such media attention on his father's actions during the war is misplaced when assessing the younger von Weizsacker's actions. Rather they point out that in an era where president of Austria Kurt Waldheim has covered up his own Nazi past, von Weizsacker's frankness about his own guilt is practically unique on the world stage, and therefore worthy of honor...
...President von Weizsacker is one of the most courageous, outspoken voices of modern Germany," says Abraham H. Foxman, the head of the international affairs commission of B'nai Brith's Anti-Defamation League...