Germany's Evil Past Revived By Trials

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30366, 15 February 1964, Page 10

Germany's Evil Past Revived By Trials

[Reprinted by arrangement with the “Sydney Morning Herald’’]

EACHING out from the ashes of the extermination camps, ■ retribution fast, if belatedly, overtaking the German Nazi Party has just dealt two severe blows to Chancellor Ludwig Erhard’s Government.

Less than 24 hours after Herr Hans Krueger, the West German Minister for Refugees and Expellees, was at his own request suspended from office while investigations are made into his wartime activities as a member of- the Nazi Party, Dr. Erhard’s chief security officer, Ewald Peters, was arrested and charged with the mass murder of Jews. Suicide Krueger’s future hinges on results of an inquiry ordered by Chancellor Erhard into recent press accusations that he served in occupied Poland as a deputy judge of a Nazi special court where Poles were sentenced to death. But for Peters there is no such uncertainty. He will never face his accusers, for two days after his arrest he was found hanged in his gaol cell in Bonn—a noose made of bed sheets his chosen method of self-execution. • The high positions of trust held by the two latest .accused make the impact on Dr. Erhard’s Government and on the West Germans themselves all the' more damaging. Visited London Herr Krueger, a member of the Christian Democratic Party, was one of the three new Cabinet members appointed by Dr. Erhard. One of his predecessors in the post, Dr. Theodor Oberlander, was forced to resign in 1960 because of his National Socialist past. Peters was the chief of the Security Police “Protection and Security” Department and was responsible for the personal security of President Heinrich Luebke as well as Chancellor Erhard -and visiting statesmen. He accompanied the Chancellor to London last month

and on his return from a visit to Rome at the end of last week he was arrested on suspicion of taking part in mass killings of Jews in Russia during the Second World War. This was the man who would have been responsible for arranging security precautions for the Queen’S scheduled visit to West Germany later this year. But why, nearly 20 years after the end of the' Second World War, are so many warcriminals only now being brought to justice? The Eichmann trial. nearly two years ago revived sickening horrors of a past the Germans still find hard to face. Since then others accused of mass murder and appalling cruelty have been arrested with surprising frequency. Escaped Justice The extent to which many key men associated with the most atrocious aspects of the Nazi movement escaped and thrived for nearly 20 years in respectable positions in post-Hitler Germany has been best shown by the current trial in Frankfurt of 22 men accused of some of the worst crimes of the regime. These former members of the staff of the Auschwitz concentration camp were successful businessmen, doctors and lawyers. They are charged with unspeakable brutality. The Germans’ rejection of their past was, after 1945, an automatic reflex. Two lost years, in inflation, an economic depression, the Nazi era, and enemy occupation were—a great many Germans thought—sufficient ' justification only to look ahead. For years after the war, Germans talked little about the past. The history of the Nazi era was badly, inadequately explained in. the

schools —a mood of deliberate forgetfulness was born and looked like staying. Also, it is often overlooked that after Germany was occupied by Allied troops, the prosecution of Nazi criminals was exclusively under the jurisdiction of the Occupation Powers. For this purpose a special uniform' control council law was passed in December, 1945. Under this statute some 5000 persons were sentenced in the Western occupation zones. To these figures must be added the trials held abroad of Germans arrested and sentenced on the territory of the country concerned. The part played by German courts was, therefore, severely restricted .by the limitations imposed on German jurisdiction by control .- council action. In 1956, the year when the last remnants of the Allied occupation statute were repealed, a new and intensified phase of the German clean-up opened. Records Found Two years later, a pile of musty old papers was found crammed behind the heating furnace in the cellar of the police headquarters in. the Ruhr district of Gelsenkirchen. They turned out to be the complete archives of the Extermination Commando 8 in Central Russia. Its activities, documented with the extraordinary care the Nazi regime brought to cataloguing its crimes, were discovered and revealed in a sensational trial at Ulm in 1958 of members of the Tilsit Extermination Commando. Until then it had been assumed that the main Nazi criminals had been judged, by the Allies, at Nuremberg and in their separate courts and by the Germans themselves when they recovered jurisdiction. But the extent of the crimes committed by the Gestapo and State security forces in occupied territory which still had to-be dealt with by German justice was made clear at the Ulm trial. The chief ministers of - the Lander (provinces) recognised the urgency and seriousness ■of the challenge. They agreed that co-ordinated efforts were essential and in October, 1958, created a central office for the prosecution of Nazi criminals to span the whole country. Five years of painstaking work by the special agency working from itg headquarters in the prison at Ludwigsburg has paid dividends. Through the agency led by Herr Erwin Schule, a senior State prosecutor, some 650 cases have been investigated involving 1000 to 1250 persons. Witnesses as far afield as South America and Australia have been tracked down. More Arrests Five hundred cases have been passed on to public prosecutors to deal with and 55 of them have been tried. The central agency beljeves that only by working in silence is it possible to ferret out the major offenders still at large before the crimes fall under the Statute of Limitations, which for murder takes effect at the end of 1965. By the , end of next year, Ludwigsburg will have brought its task; to a close, with the exception of a-small information role. Before then more arrests and trials can be expected, but it will be another four or five years before the cases themselves have been- dealt with and German, justice can really draw a line under the record of. past crime.