as 1933, sentence prisoners to death for "disobedience" without needing to provide any additional justification or explanation. In 2005, journalist Charles Lane wrote that many Germans, then and now, claimed that West Germany had thoroughly learned a lesson from the Nazi era, pointing to its abolishment of capital punishment as an example. However, Lane said the real reason West Germany abolished capital punishment early-on was to protect Nazi war criminals from execution. Many members of the West German parliament were shocked when Hans-Christoph Seebohm, the leader of the far-right German Party, introduced a motion to abolish capital punishment. In his speech to his fellow legislators, Seebohm equated executions by the Nazi regime to executions "after 1945", those of war criminals. According to British historian Richard J. Evans, Seebohm "was thinking primarily of the executions of the war criminals, against which he and his party had so clearly opposed. Preventing Nazi war criminals from being sentenced to death would no doubt lure more voters to the extreme right for the NPD." The SPD and CDU initially both rejected the proposal, the SPD since nearly 80 percent of the West German public supported capital punishment, and the CDU since they mostly supported capital punishment for ordinary murderers. However, both parties started to see the advantages of the proposal. For the SPD, which genuinely opposed capital punishment outright, Seebohm gave them cover for an objective they were too afraid to pursue on their own, whereas for more than half of those in the CDU, the political advantages of shielding Nazi war criminals from execution overrode their support for capital punishment in ordinary murder cases. As soon as West Germany abolished capital punishment via Article 102, the West German government immediately started lobbying for clemency for all Nazi war criminals who were on death row under Allied military law, citing the new law. Lane noted that as late as the 1960s, polls showed that 71% of the West German public supported the reinstatement of capital punishment, which the CDU unsuccessfully tried to do. A 2017 study found that "judges more committed to the Nazi Party were more likely to impose the death sentence on defendants belonging to organised political opposition groups, those accused of violent resistance and those with characteristics to which Nazism was intolerant." After World War II After World War II, hundreds of executions of common and war criminals were carried out