Word: bundestag
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...active in state government and emerged as one of the founders of the German Federal Republic. In 1948 he headed his party's delegation to the parliamentary council that drafted the nation's Basic Law. A year later he was elected a charter member of the Bundestag and served as its Vice President for 20 years before retiring in 1972. Co ordinator of programs under the 1963 Franco-German Reconciliation Agreement from 1969 until his death, Schmid bitterly regretted his late entry into statecraft: "I believed earlier that one should stay away from politics because one could...
After seven hours of intense debate, West Germany's Bundestag last week voted, 253 to 228, to abolish the statute of limitation on murder that would have made it impossible for the Federal Republic to prosecute newly uncovered Nazi war killers after Dec. 31. The vote was a triumph for Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and Justice Minister Hans-Jochen Vogel, who had led the parliamentary fight to lift the 30-year time limit. Said Vogel: "After Auschwitz, there can be no statute of limitation for murder in Germany...
...with war crimes since 1945, only 6,440 have been convicted, and only 166 received the maximum sentence of life imprisonment. Opponents of the present law were afraid that some of the several thousand Nazi criminals in hiding abroad might escape justice. There has been international pressure on the Bundestag, particularly from Jews around the world, to abolish the statute of limitation, but television played its part as well. After the U.S. series Holocaust was shown on West German TV, a poll showed a striking increase in the number of people approving a change...
...While still a student, he joined the S.P.D., partly because his schoolteacher father had been a lifelong member. A successful stint as a whiz-kid interior minister in the Hamburg local government at 31 earned him national recognition. In his first try in 1953 he was elected to the Bundestag. In 1969, after two years as S.P.D. Bundestag floor leader, he entered Brandt's national Cabinet as Defense Minister. By the time Brandt began to lose his political authority Schmidt was West Germany's internationally regarded Finance Minister and the Chancellor's increasingly powerful standin. "When occasionally Willy wouldn...
...have correspondingly dominant control over his own government, which is a coalition of his own S.P.D. and the middle-road Free Democratic Party. In the surprisingly close 1976 elections, the S.P.D.-F.D.P. coalition ended up with a greatly reduced majority ?253 out of 496 voting seats in the Bundestag. Although F.D.P. today has only 40 seats in the Bundestag compared with the S.P.D.'s 224, the F.D.P. can, and does, exercise disproportionate power in the coalition. With four key portfolios in its hands, the F.D.P. can make its voice heard in major policy decisions. Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher...