The German parliament voted last night to plug a pensions loophole that allowed thousands of Nazi war criminals to claim a special military pension. Dr Helmut Kohl's centre-right coalition backed a proposal by the Greens to change a 1950 law that allowed war criminals living in Germany to claim an extra pension if they were wounded on active service.
The move was prompted by a television documentary which claimed that up to 50,000 of the 1.1 million Germans claiming war pensions were involved in war crimes. The programme highlighted the cases of Lieut Wolfgang Lehnigk-Emden and a former SS train driver, Heinz Barth.
Lehnigk-Emden is accused of murdering 22 civilians in Italy in 1943 and Barth is currently in jail for war crimes because he and his unit took part in the shooting of 642 people, including 202 children, in France in 1944.
A German court this year confirmed that Barth was entitled to an extra pension, even while he was serving time in prison for his war crimes.
"It was this case that made the governing coalition see that it is not acceptable that courts have to award victims' pensions to convicted war criminals. His pension will certainly be cut," according to a Green deputy, Mr Ulrich Beck, who proposed the change in the law.
The Greens wanted to go further by stripping all former volunteer soldiers in the Waffen SS of the extra cash but the government insisted that each case should be judged individually.
The Social Democrats opposed changing the law, arguing that social welfare payments should not be linked to any evaluation of a recipient's past but should be given to those who need them.
More than 50 years after the end of the second World War, many war criminals are dead but their relatives continue to claim their pensions. Mr Beck predicted that the authorities would think carefully before stripping widows of their extra pensions.
