Germany's disgraced former chancellor, Dr Helmut Kohl, has started a fresh row by comparing the governing Social Democrats' treatment of him to the Nazi persecution of the Jews. Dr Kohl said calls by a senior SPD politician for a boycott of his latest fund-raising efforts resembled the boycott of Jewish shops in Germany during the 1930s.
"That made me remember how I was taken by my mother into certain shops where other people didn't go because a sign hung there: `Germans don't shop here'," he said.
Dr Kohl has collected more than £3 million in recent months to help pay fines imposed on his Christian Democrats (CDU) on account of his acceptance of illegal political donations during his 16 years as chancellor. He is under criminal investigation for his behaviour, and a parliamentary committee is investigating whether the secret donations influenced his government's actions.
Mr Michel Friedman, a leading Christian Democrat and a member of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, condemned the former chancellor's outburst as an inexcusable gaffe.
"The comparison is irresponsible, historically false and politically unacceptable. Drawing a parallel here trivialises the persecution of the Jewish community in the Third Reich," he said.
Mr Friedman pointed out that, whereas Jews were stripped of many legal rights under Hitler, Dr Kohl had every right of legal redress.
Dr Kohl was 15 when the second World War ended and served briefly as a conscript in the Hitler Youth, but there is no evidence that his devoutly Catholic family supported the Nazi regime. Although the former chancellor was occasionally accused of insensitivity towards Germany's past during his years in power, he had good relations with the Jewish community and approved the construction of a Holocaust memorial next to the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.
Dr Kohl's outburst came after an independent investigation confirmed that files relating to a number of controversial decisions made by the former government have disappeared from the Chancellery. Among the missing files are documents relating to the sale of an eastern German oil refinery and a controversial decision to sell tanks to Saudi Arabia.
An SPD member of the parliamentary committee looking into the funding scandal has accused Dr Kohl's former colleagues of "a collective loss of memory". The former chancellor will be questioned next Thursday but he has repeated that he will refuse to reveal the names of illegal donors to his party.
