Germany's Joschka Fischer under fire over obituaries

Germany's foreign minister is facing a rebellion by 70 current and former diplomats following his decision to ban staff obituaries of former staff who had been members of the Nazi party NSDAP. Fischer's decision not to allow posthumous tributes to a few former diplomats in the ministry's in-house magazine "InternAA" has left some leading staff members furious. In their leaked protest letter, due to appear in the May issue of the magazine, the diplomats accuse Fischer of arrogance and make a barbed reference to his past as a radical student leader. "Refusing to pay tribute based on the sole criteria that someone used to belong to an organization of the Third Reich is the expression of an inflated self-esteem and shows the over-simplification of the sort of people who, as long ago as 1968, thought they could not trust anyone over the age of 30", the letter says. However, the vice president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Salomon Korn, has defended Fischer's stance.