Germany returns 22 Benin Bronze looted artefacts to Nigeria. See details

Now, with the support of several parties in the Bundestag lower house of parliament as well as Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, Klein wants to wipe the slate clean -- preferably before the end of the current term in September. But the question remains whether to introduce a single law to reform all the texts at once, or to approach them one by one.

Germany has already reformed several Nazi-era laws over the years, including the infamous Paragraph 175 that criminalised sex between men and was repealed in 1994. More recently, a 1933 ban on medical practitioners "advertising" that they carry out pregnancy terminations was partially scrapped in 2019. But some pertinent examples remain, including a law on altering names introduced by Nazi interior minister Wilhelm Frick in 1938.

From January 1939, a change to the law forced Jewish people to add the names "Sara" or "Israel" to their first names if they did not have a name that was considered typically Jewish. The law "played a huge role in the exclusion and disenfranchisement of Jews", said Thorsten Frei, deputy leader of the conservative CDU party's parliamentary group. The section on Jewish names was scrapped by the Allies immediately after World War II, but the remaining text from 1938 was incorporated into federal law in 1954.

Although it was adopted four years after World War II ended on May 8, 1945, aspects of Germany's Basic Law, which charted a clear course away from Nazi ideology, have also come under fire -- particularly from the political left. Critics are calling for a revision of Article 3 of the constitution, which contains the term "race". In June 2020, Chancellor Angela Merkel declared herself open to the idea.