GERMANY: A row over attitudes towards Jews and Germany's view of the second World War reached a crisis point yesterday when the Israeli ambassador in Berlin demanded the resignation of a conservative politician.
The politician, Mr Martin Hohmann of the Christian Democrats, had said it could be argued that Jews were as much "a race of perpetrators" of mass murder as Germans.
The ambassador, Mr Schimon Stein, said yesterday that many Germans appeared to share the anti-Semitic views of Mr Hohmann. He added: "It is not yet anchored in the German consciousness that anti-Semitism is a societal problem.
"The only decision that I think is right is to demand Mr Hohmann resign his seat," Mr Stein said in an interview with Der Spiegel magazine. He criticised the CDU's decision to reprimand Mr Hohmann instead.
"Perhaps there are people who think the things he said aren't so bad and that the steps taken by the CDU parliamentary party are sufficient. It appears there is still a group of people who share his prejudice," he said.
Mr Hohmann, a CDU bankbencher, is under investigation by German authorities for inciting racial hatred after making a speech in which he said that Jews shared guilt for the massacres of the Russian Revolution because many acted as leaders and members of secret police firing squads.
"To term the Jewish people 'perpetrators' may sound shocking. But it would follow the same logic that has branded the German people as perpetrators," said Mr Hohmann, arguing that in both cases it was people who had turned their back on their religion who carried out massacres. "Hence neither 'the Germans' nor 'the Jews' are perpetrators." he said.
The speech only came to light when a US woman found it on the Internet and forwarded it to a German television station which ran the story, now headline news in Germany for over a week.
The Chancellor, Mr Gerhard Schröder, called it a "dangerous speech . . . using the lowest clichés". When the head of the German special forces, the equivalent of Britain's SAS, praised the speech on German television this week, he was fired within hours.
Ms Angela Merkel, the CDU leader, said the party distanced itself from Mr Hohmann's "completely unacceptable" speech and warned him that any similar outbursts in the future would end his political career in the party.
Mr Hohmann made a qualified apology earlier this week, although it emerged yesterday that he had apparently made similar remarks in the past.
The Jewish Claims Conference complained to CDU leaders two years ago that Mr Hohmann, at the time a CDU representative on a committee to agree compensation for Nazi forced labourers, used "formulations and stereotypes that already in the Weimar Republic were related to right-wing extremists".
CDU insiders say Ms Merkel was ready to expel Mr Hohmann last weekend, a difficult and divisive route that would require a two-thirds majority of the parliamentary party, but was warned against it by senior party officials.
"The vote could be disastrous for us if the two-thirds majority was only barely reached, or not at all," said one source in the CDU. "You can't see it just from a moral point of view. It's also about political conseqences down the road."
The last politician to be thrown out of his party, also for anti-Semitic remarks, was Mr Jürgen Möllemann, the former deputy leader of the liberal Free Democrats (FDP). But it took party leaders months of damaging and divisive debate to expel him earlier this year, after which he apparently committed suicide during a parachute jump.
A spokesman said yesterday that the party had taken the necessary steps and that there were "no plans at present to take any further action".
However, Ms Merkel faces a tough decision this weekend. One CDU member put it bluntly yesterday: "It's not just a question of whether Mr Hohmann with his remarks would find company in our party, but also in our society as a whole."
The scandal comes as Germany debates one of its last taboos: whether Germans were exclusively perpetrators of the second World War, or whether those who died in firebomb attacks on Dresden, for instance, were victims of the war.
The debate has been watched with concern by Jewish groups and the Israeli ambassador, who has expressed concern that relativising German guilt could be taken advantage of by anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi groups.
"It's outrageous, classic anti-Semitism, that we long thought had been filed away. That was perhaps a fallacy," said the ambassador.