WAR CRIMINALS

Evening Post, Volume CXL, Issue 61, 10 September 1945, Page 5

WAR CRIMINALS

COLLECTIVE TRIALS

LONDON. September 8.

As many as 400,000 Nazis may be tried for war crimes, says the Associated Press. The guilty leaders will probably be hanged, while the small fry who escape death may be given labour sentences^ perhaps helping to rebuild what the, lestroyed in Russia and elsewhere.

Hitler's terror organisations such as the Gestapo and the Elite Guard will be charged collectively, and conviction will mean automatic punishment of any member unless he is able to prove that he was forced to join the unit.

[ The Nuremberg trial of master criminals Hke Goering will set the pattern for other trials. Investigators have I culled tons of German official documents, and they believe that many of the Germans may have written their own death warrants in their meticulous official reports of mass murders. One of the leading Nazi war criminals awaiting trial in Nuremberg yesterday attacked a soldier guarding his cell, whose order he had refused to obey. The guard moved towards him, demanding obedience, and the prisoner jumped at th* guard and attempted ta pin him against the wall. The guard was not injured, and the prisoner was handled only sufficiently roughly to subdue him. The prisoner is not iden« tified. except as "That so-and-so, who is crazy, or pretending" to be." A psychiatrist has been rushed from Paris to examine him.