Germany’s anti-Semitism commissioner called for the removal of 29 Nazi-era paragraphs that remain in the country’s constitution in comments published on Sunday.
Felix Klein, appointed two years ago by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet, says the worst example is the Nazi remnants of 1938 in Germany’s current law on changing a person’s name.
Jews in Nazi Germany were required under a 1939 rule that stemmed from the law to enter a “typical” Jewish first name, Israeli for men, and Sara for women, if their first name was not on the “typical” list maintained by Interior at that time the Ministry.
Klein, who last year, with Social Democrat Eva Högl and Christian Democrat Thorsten Frei, demanded the removal of these words used to persecute Jews, the magazine said Glass Parliament has sent out a catalog of reformulations.
“The name change law is the most striking of them all,” Klein said, adding that the latest version – dated 2008 and still accessible at Ministry of Justice website – Still mentions “German Reich” and “Reich Interior Minister,” terminology banned by Hitler’s defeated regime.
In last year’s appeal, Klein, Högl and Frei wrote that the occupying Allied Control Council had attempted to overturn the law, but that the law remained in effect under Article 125 of Germany’s post-war Constitution.
“Anyone looking to change their first or last name in Germany today is [still] faced with an anti-Semitic motivated law of 1938, “they said.
Instead, the amendments should declare “the Federal Republic of Germany” and “the Federal Interior Minister,” Klein said. Spiegel in his latest call.
Naturopathic law is also polluted
As a surviving example, Klein cites Nazi-era paragraphs covering current German law on naturopathic healing practitioners, its gambling casino regulations, and joint Greco-German legislation on civil legal aid.
Klein said the goal of the omnibus legislation before the Bundestag was to review and remove all remaining parts of the Nazi era.
In their 2020 joint call, Klein, Hogl and Frei said a further aim was to avoid words that define Germany’s post-war federal interior minister as a “successor” to the Nazi-era Reich interior minister and be punished. war criminal Wilhelm Frick.
It was Frick, who was convicted at the Allied Nuremberg trials and executed in 1946, who since 1930 in the then state of Thuringia has sought German citizenship for Adolf Hitler who was born in Austria but stateless, whom Prussia considers an unwanted alien.
Hitler finally obtained German citizenship in 1932, through the then-adjacent German state of Braunschweig, a year later becoming chancellor of Germany and seizing power.
ipj / aw (KNA, epd)
