Germany: towards an abolition of the last Nazi laws
Nazi officials accused of war crimes during World War II at the Nuremberg trials listen to the verdict being read on October 2, 1946. © AFP - -INP / INTERNATIONAL NEWS PHOTOS (INP) / AFP
Text by: Pascal Thibaut Follow
4 min
The antidemocratic or anti-Semitic provisions adopted by the Third Reich were abolished just after the war but the purified texts of their extreme measures were able to endure although their origins and certain references remain very sulphurous.
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From our correspondent in Berlin,
The law on name changes still mentions "the Reich Minister of the Interior" today.
This 1938 text bore the signature of Wilhelm Frick who held this position under the Third Reich from 1933 to 1943. He was sentenced to death in 1946 for war crimes and crimes against humanity during the
Nuremberg trials
against senior Nazi leaders .
The law had been adopted above all against the German Jews obliging from January 1, 1939 men and women to add respectively the first names Israel and Sara to their official first names.
The text reinforced, like many others before it, the exclusion of the Jews a little more.
The Allied Control Council, set up after the capitulation of the Nazi regime to manage Germany, in September 1945 abolished the law giving full powers to Hitler in 1933 as well as the legislation of the Third Reich.
Discriminatory provisions against persons on the basis of their origin or religion were prohibited.
Several dozen other similar decisions of the Allied Control Council contributed to the denazification of German law, but all traces did not disappear.
The 1938 text was stripped of its anti-Semitic dimension and in 1954 became, by administrative decision, a law of the Federal Republic of Germany.
But despite many amendments since, the last traces of the origin of these provisions have never been completely erased.
At the end of 2019, the delegate of the German government in charge of the fight against anti-Semitism received a letter from a woman who wished to remain anonymous, according to the weekly
Der Spiegel
.
The sender asks Felix Klein to ensure that the last remnants of Nazi legislation disappear for good.
The recipient of the mail does not remain inactive.
Three months later, he published a column in the press with two deputies from the two parties making up the grand coalition, the CDU and the SPD.
In the text entitled "
Finally remove the Nazi paragraphs!"
", The authors write:"
A person who wants today to change his name or his first name is confronted with a text adopted at the time for anti-Semitic reasons.
This is unbearable, not only for the Jews
”.
The authors of the tribune request a correction of the text so that the current leaders of Germany do not appear indirectly in the continuity of "
Minister of the Interior of the Reich ”always mentioned in the text.
They also demand a systematic removal of traces of the Third Reich in current laws.
►
To read also: Auschwitz and the Third Reich: what relationship do the Germans have with their past?
Twenty-nine texts would be affected.
Apart from the one on the changes of names and first names, - the most emblematic - other more technical laws are concerned such as that on naturopaths or on casinos.
Felix Klein wanted the German Parliament to be able to make all the necessary corrections at once, but such a procedure seems too ambitious.
With the support of the Home Office, a reform of the law on name changes is expected to take place before the end of the current legislature in September.
Social Democrat MP Helge Lindh, in charge of the file for his party, believes, questioned by RFI, that the survival of these provisions constitutes "
a shame
".
He recalls that the disappearance of the Third Reich had certainly put an end to the rule of law which reigned under Nazism, but that the structures and personnel from this period had endured.
And later generations have not always had sufficient sensitivity to “
denazify
” a certain number of texts.
This Wednesday January 27 is the International Day dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust, anniversary of the liberation of
the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp
, January 27, 1945.
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