NOW CIVILIANS

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 21853, 25 October 1945, Page 7

NOW CIVILIANS

THREE GERMAN LEADERS GOERING, KEITEL AND JODL Reichsmarshal Goering, FieldMarshal Keitel and General Jodi, three of the group of German leaders awaiting trial in prison here, have been stripped of rank in the Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht, discharged from these services, and have reverted to plain Herr, wrote a London correspondent from Nuremberg recently. The Geneva Convention forbids solitary confinement in the case of war prisoners taken from the enemy’s fighting services. It is, however, permissible to place civilians in solitary confinement, and it is as civilians that these three prisoners are now regarded. The procedure under which they were discharged is that laid down by Military Government regulations, but the difference in the cases of Goering, Keitel and Jodi, as compared with other members of Germany’s fighting forces, is that they were immediately rearrested as civilians and held to face war crimes charges.