Germany: Minister forced to apologise to US for 'Hitler remarks'

Last day of campaigning overshadowed as leading parties hit by insensitive comments about Nazi leader and Jewish community

The German election campaign was in turmoil last night after the Chancellor's Justice minister apologised to the Ambassador of the United States for likening President Bush to Adolf Hitler.

Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's Social Democrats (SDP) had to mount a full-scale damage limitation operation over remarks reportedly made by the Justice Minister, Herta Daeubler-Gmelin.

Her humiliating climbdown was matched by open conflict at the top of the Free Democrat Party, the liberal, free-market party that hopes to form a coalition government with Mr Edmund Stoiber's centre-right CSU/CDU alliance.

As the day wore on, and emergency press conference succeeded emergency press conference, it was hard to say which of the disputes was the most harmful. The first storm blew up around the SDP's Ms Daeubler-Gmelin, whose alleged remarks about Hitler were made at a campaign rally and reported in a provincial newspaper. Like Hitler, Mr Bush was using a foreign issue – Iraq – to distract voters' from his political problems at home, she reportedly said.

At an hour-long press conference in the morning, the SDP spokesman said many times over that there was no record of the minister's remarks, and in the absence of evidence to the contrary, her version should be believed. With party support clearly dwindling, however, Ms Daeubler-Gmelin offered an apology to the US ambassador, Dan Coates, and then had to turn up to defend herself to reporters in person.

"I want to contribute to clearing away shadows, if there are any," she said she told the ambassador. But she also told reporters that she had been libelled and misquoted.

The potential harm was twofold: first, she appeared to have delivered the ultimate German insult to a foreign leader, multiplying many times over the harm inflicted on US-German relations by Mr Schröder's anti-war pronouncements. Second, it did not take much imagination to turn the accusation of finding a problem abroad to distract attention from domestic difficulties to Mr Schröder's own use of the Iraq issue in the last weeks of the election.

At the FDP, the deputy head of the party, Juergen Möllemann, had chosen the last days of campaigning to repeat criticism of the chairman of Germany's Jewish Board of Deputies, Michel Friedman, over his support for what Mr Möllemann called the "militaristic" policies of Israel. He had created a furore when he had voiced similar criticism in June, but the initial scandal had largely died down.

Any criticism of Israel is a highly sensitive issue in Germany and not something that can be expressed with impunity during an election. The head of the FDP, Guido Westerwelle, quickly dissociated himself from Mr Möllemann's remarks and proclaimed Mr Möllemann had disqualified himself from taking part in any coalition government. Mr Stoiber, sensing that the danger could extend to his party's prospects, made the same point. Mr Möllemann, however, refused to go quietly, and insisted that he still considered himself a possible future minister.

In a "normal" election, even such high-profile and sensitive disputes so close to polling day might have little effect on the outcome. With the parties so close, however, and likely coalitions still very much in flux, the slightest gaffe could lose much-needed votes.

Last night, 36 hours before the polls opened, Mr Schröder's Social Democrats (SDP) and Edmund Stoiber's CSU/CDU alliance were still running neck and neck, with opinion pollsters warning that the outcome was too close to forecast with any accuracy. All five major polls found the gap between the two main parties, much narrower than the 2.5 per cent margin of error.

It is part of the FDP's campaign pitch to present itself as a credible coalition partner. It hopes for 18 per cent of the vote. Its latest standing in the polls is between 8 and 9.5 per cent.