13 April 2007
Charlotte Knobloch, president the Central Council of Jews in Germany, has sharply criticized a regional governor for praising his controversial predecessor who had to resign after it was revealed that he had served as a Nazi-era judge. At a funeral service in Freiburg, Günther H. Oettinger, the current governor of the southwestern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, said that his predecessor Hans Filbinger, who died last week at the age of 93, had never been a Nazi but "an opponent of the Nazi regime." Oettinger said that Filbinger could not avoid serving the regime any more than millions of other contemporaries.” Filbinger was forced to resign as governor of the state in 1978 when it was revealed he had served as a judge during the Nazi period and had taken part in controversial cases that ended with death sentences.
Charlotte Knobloch called Oettinger’s eulogy "a dangerous and offensive perversion of historical reality." She said: "We can today no longer seriously discuss whether Filbinger cooperated with the Nazi regime or not, of course he did. In the face of these facts the words of the governor of Baden-Württemberg sound more than absurd." Leaders from opposition parties also sharply criticized Oettinger, who – like Filbinger – is a member of German chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union.
