Bavaria Will Rethink Nazi Kin’s Pensions

Bavarian authorities, stung by embarrassing revelations that they are giving “war victim” pensions to families of Nazi war criminals, said Friday that they will re-examine the practice.

The reassessment began after a local politician, Social Democratic state Sen. Guenther Wirth, stirred controversy with disclosures that Bavaria is giving cash to the widow of Nazi judge Roland Freisler and the widow of a man hanged for running extermination squads--the Einzatzgruppen--in the Soviet Union.

“These men were not victims of the war, charged Wirth, who has been attempting to obtain pensions for widows denied them by the authorities. They were war criminals.”

“We are reviewing some aspects of our war pension system,” a spokesman for the conservative Bavarian state government said Friday.

Wirth stumbled on the fact that Freisler’s widow, who lives in Munich, was being paid at least two pensions--one as a war widow and another as the widow of a state official. Freisler, a judge in the “people’s courts,” ordered dozens of deaths-- accompanying the verdicts with a torrent of abuse--until his death Feb. 3, 1945, when an Allied bomb fell on his courtroom in Berlin.

After Wirth’s recent revelations, the Freisler widow’s war pension was frozen, but her other allowances were continued on the ground that it was too legally complicated to challenge them.

Wirth also uncovered the case of the widow of Werner Braune, a Nazi commander of one of the liquidation squads that traveled behind the invading German troops into the Soviet Union and began systematically killing Jews and other groups in mobile gas chambers. She is receiving a widow’s pension despite the fact that her husband was hanged as a war criminal by the Allies in 1951, Wirth said.