Andreas Laake, the head of a victims’ association for “stolen children in the GDR”, estimates the total number of forced adoptions over the state’s 40-year existence to be as high as 8,000, and has recorded 2,000 infant deaths that his organisation suspects could be disguising forced adoptions. In five of these cases, the association has been able to confirm that the deaths were falsely reported. But a state-commissioned report published at the start of this year insists that they were isolated incidents: “A systematic, planned and explicitly politically motivated endeavour on behalf of the state within the adoption procedures could not be proven,” it says. Proof of the opposite would probably oblige the German state to pay compensation to thousands of victims.
The Good Socialists would never have done something like that.
Haven’t the West Germans paid enough to the East Germans?
On top of paying billions of Deutchmarks to clean up and rebuild the DDR, they had 16 years of Mutti Merkel FFS.
They kept voting for the poisonous old cow.
I often wondered how it worked in law: is a successor state in any way liable for the activities of a previous regime ?
Are any of the ex Soviet republics liable for crimes and misdemeanours up to 1990 ?
I guess if the successor state writes its own constitution and nullifies the old one, it can make the rules up as it likes.
Answers on a postcard please.
Didn’t West Germany prosecute Honecker, under West German law, for crimes committed when he was head of the GDR which, at the time, abided by Soviet influenced law and order?
You’ll have noted the trials for war crimes after WW2. So yes, those who served the Nazi state were held liable for their actions.
But they were disgusting show trials with Stalin’s murderous henchmen judging people on evidence that was some of it probably faked.
It would have been better just to shoot the bloody Nazis than to sully ourselves with that display.
There are differences between sucessor states, replacement states, continuing states. Through history sometimes replacement states have declared themselves to be sucessor states and assumes the previous state’s resposibilities to gain legitimacy for replacing them. There was a court case in the early 1950s to decide if West Germany was a sucessor state or a replacement state, based on decideing whether in 1945 Germany had collapsed so much that the state had extinguished.
“Pay compensation.” The hook is buried fairly deep in the meat.