Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.twt.news From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: Poll finds 1 in 3 Germans see good side to Nazis Date: Sat, 7 Nov 92 19:23:58 EST Message-ID: \SE A;WORLD \SS (WS) \HD Poll finds 1 in 3 Germans see good side to Nazis \BY REUTERS \DT BONN BONN (Reuters) - About one in three Germans believes the Nazi era had its good side and that Jews are partly to blame for having been persecuted so often in history, according to a poll released yesterday. The poll was conducted against a backdrop of spreading xenophobic violence in Germany, including assaults on Jewish Holocaust memorials. It was published three days before Monday's 54th anniversary of a notorious Nazi pogrom against Jews. However, surveys by the Infas polling institute in 1982 and 1987 detected a wider degree of anti-Semitism, suggesting that current rightist disturbances remained the province of a small minority. In New York, the World Jewish Congress said that Germany has signed an agreement to pay millions of dollars to Jewish victims of Nazi persecution who previously received minimal reparations or none at all. Sources said the agreement could lead to Jews in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union - who were barred because of communist rule from receiving West German reparations in the 1950s and 1960s - now obtaining hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation. The accord was quietly signed last week in Bonn by the German Finance Ministry, the World Jewish Congress and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, WJC Executive Director Elan Steinberg said. More than 80,000 people, including Chancellor Helmut Kohl, are expected to take part in a special anti-racism rally in Berlin tomorrow to counter impressions that most Germans are closet bigots if not active rightists. Germany's employer, trade and industry associations said they had formed a committee to combat xenophobia because it is deterring foreign investment in the country's impoverished formerly communist East. Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel has struggled to rescue Germany's image abroad, and the government has had to fend off accusations of "appeasement" for scrambling to curtail immigration in response to neo-Nazi attacks. A poll released in Paris yesterday showed that two out of three French people are concerned by the rise of Germany's extreme right and nearly 75 percent believe it is dangerous for French Jews. The survey, conducted for France's Jewish Renewal movement by the MV2 polling group, also showed 61 percent of the French believed anti-Semitism had grown in France in the past decade. In Infas' survey of 3,000 Germans, 32 percent agreed with the notion that Hitler's 1933-45 Nazi regime had its good sides before launching World War II. Infas said 10 percent of Western Germans and 4 percent in the country's formerly communist East agreed wholeheartedly with the statement: "It is the Jews' own fault that they have been persecuted so often in their history." Twenty-eight percent in the West and 27 percent in the East said there was "a bit of truth" to that view. Germany's Jewish council, noting Monday's anniversary of the Nazis' 1938 "Kristallnacht" [Night of the Shattering Glass] pogrom, said the rightist resurgence obliged postwar Germans more than ever to stand up for democracy and tolerance. Mr. Kohl, President Richard von Weizsaecker, other top federal government figures and 13 of Germany's 16 state prime ministers will take part in the demonstration. This article is copyright 1992 The Washington Times. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM