GERMANY: Amends to the Jews

For what Chancellor Adenauer called unspeakable crimes committed in the name of the German people," West Germany's Bundestag last week voted world Jewry $822 million in reparations. It was ten years after Hitler's SS began liquidating the Warsaw Ghetto, eight years after the murder of the last of 6,000,000 European Jews; in West Germany only 20,000 of the pre-Hitler Jewish population of 600,000 survives. Some Jews objected to the reparations on the grounds that money could never repay lives, and that Germans should not be allowed to purchase an easing of their conscience. But the important thing about the reparations...