German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer has sacked his ambassador to Switzerland, Frank Elbe, following public criticism aimed at Fischer by the envoy, a ministry spokeswoman said Thursday. Elbe sharply criticized his boss after Fischer ordered a halt to the publication of death notices for diplomats who had been Nazi party members. The ambassador, in a letter published by the mass tabloid Bild, warned that Fischer was dividing the German Foreign Ministry and slammed the ministry's crisis management as "miserable". The paper quoted Elbe as saying Fischer's decision to stop publishing obituaries for diplomats who were members of Adolf Hitler's Nazi party amounted to smearing them as Nazi supporters. More than 70 German diplomats have signed a protest letter, due to be published next month, which is aimed at Fischer for his decision to halt the obituaries. His decision came after a German diplomat, Frank Nuesslein who was convicted of war crimes after serving as a Third Reich judge in German-occupied Czechoslovakia, had his past whitewashed out of a ministry death notice in 2003. --More 0020 Local Time 2120 GMT
