German media coverage was overwhelmingly on the side of the condemned, who were depicted as the innocent victims of American "lynch law". Although the protestors at Landsberg claimed to be good-faith opponents of capital punishment itself, and not motivated by any kind of pro-Nazi or anti-Semitic feelings, their actions belied their words. When a group of about 300 Jewish counter-protestors arrived at Landsberg demanding the execution of war criminals on 7 January 1951, the German protestors demanding amnesty began to chant the Nazi-era slogan "Juden raus! Juden raus!" ("Jews out! Jews out!") and then proceed to beat up the Jewish protestors. The German historian Norbert Frei observed that almost all of the politicians who demanded freedom for condemned prisoners at Landsberg at various protest rallies outside the prison, such as Richard Jaeger of the CSU, later became prominent advocates of restoring capital punishment, which strongly suggested that what people like Jaeger objected to was not executions in general, but the executions of Nazi war criminals. Another politician who spoke at the protest rallies outside Landsberg prison was Gebhard Seelos of the Bavaria Party, who called the prisoners of Landsberg together with Heligoland—which was being used as target practice by the RAF—to be "beacons of the German Volk in their struggle for justice, peace and the reconciliation of nations". Seelos went on to compare the suffering of the condemned prisoners at Landsberg with that of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, and argued that to execute the prisoners on death row at Landsberg would be an act every bit as "inhumane" as the Holocaust. Seelos's speech drew loud applause from the crowd. Frei called Seelos's speech, with its claim that the war criminals facing execution at Landsberg were just as much victims as the Jews that they killed in the Holocaust, a "breathtaking" exercise in moral equivalence. In early 1951 the Bavarian parliament passed a resolution declaring that all military prisoners at Landsberg, Werl, and Wittlich should be recognized as POWs, making them the financial responsibility of the Federal German government. On 2 January 1951, the West German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, met the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, John J. McCloy, to argue that the status of the Landsberg prisoners was not so much a legal question as a political one, and that to execute the Landsberg prisoners would ruin forever any effort at having the Federal Republic play