POSSIBLE HEADACHE

Evening Post, Volume CXL, Issue 148, 20 December 1945, Page 8

POSSIBLE HEADACHE

30,000 APPLICATIONS FOR HEARING

NUREMBERG, December 19. An estimated number of 30,000 individual applications by members of the SA, SS, and the Nazi Leadership Corps who want to explain why they joined those organisations may. soon Erovide the International Military Triunal with a first-class headache, says the Associated Press correspondent. If those three Nazi organisations, together with the Reich Cabinet, the Gestapo, and the Wehrmacht High Command, are deemed to be criminal, prosecution at the present trial seeking to prove it will mean that all Germans who were members could automatically be considered criminals. The secretary of the Tribunal, Mr. H. B. Willey, said that the charge contained a clause which was well publicised throughout Germany and Austria announcing that members of such organisations could 3eek permission to be heard by the Court. It now seems that the authorities never realised the extent to which the invitation would be used. A spokesman for 12,000 SS men now imprisoned at Dachau has officially requested that his men be given an opportunity to defend themselves. A British estimate places the number of members of the Nazi Leadership Corps in their zone who have requested the same privilege at 18.000. Scores of letters are arriving daily from workers, railwaymen, and petty officials, claiming that their membership of the organisations was obligatory, that if they had not joined they and their families would have starved, and so on. Some , applications attached "dishonourable discharge" certificates from the indicated organisations, expelling them because of "undependability" A few even attached testimonials from Jew* whom they helped. As soon as the Tribunal decides one way or the other on the guilt of the six organisations, an unprecedented administrative and legal tangle will present itself.