Acquitted Nazis Held For Safety

Wanganui Chronicle, 4 October 1946, Page 5

Acquitted Nazis Held For Safety

Germans Want To Try Them

Reed. 11 p.m. London. Oct. 3. Von Papen, Schacht and Fritsche, the three accused acquitted by the War Crimes Tribunal, have been refused permission to leave Nuremberg in their own interests. German feeling against them is bitter and many demands for their re-arrest and trial by German courts have been made.

They could have gone earlier, but were frightened io do so.

The executive of the Communist Party in Bavaria sent a telegram to the Chief Prosecutor of the Bavarian Ministry of Justice and the Chief Prosecutor at Nuremberg asking for the immediate arrest of the three acquitted on charges of high treason and murder.

A ten-minute strike is expected in many Berlin factories to-morrow as a protest against the sentences, says Reuter’s Hamburg correspondent. The German trade unions’ newspaper Frie Gewerkscliaft said: “Those sentenced to imprisonment are just as guilty as those sentenced to death. Why should they get away with it? They also deserve the rope.” The State Assembly. of Greater Hesse adopted a motion by the Democratic Party that Papen, Schacht and Fritsche should be brought before the German Court and charged with high treason. Agency correspondents report that a mass demonstration of the Socialist United Party at Zwickau in Saxony, carried a motion that the three acquitted should be tried by the German People s Court. The "Times'’ Nuremberg correspondent says that the opinion is widely held that in relation to Schacht's and von Papen’s acquittals the death sentence passed on Jodi was unduly severe. It is pointed out that whereas the Court, in discharging Schacht, accepted his interpretation of events on which the prosecution put an equally credible meaning, they entirely rejected Jodi's explanation of his handling of Hitler's orders and hie efforts to modify them. The judgment, in calling Jodi “the war's actual planner,” disregarded his defence, namely, that when he returned to the High Command after a long period of field service, plans for

the invasion of Poland were already in existence, and so far from expecting war he booked passages tor a Mediterranean cruise. The correspondent says that Jodi was certainly more staggered by the death sentence than any man in the dock. FATHER OUT, £ON IN Von Papen’s son, Captain Franz von Paper, who was released from a prison camp to help in his father’s defence, was arrested yesterday outside his father’s courthouse room, says the “Daily Herald’s” Nuremberg correspondent. He arrived in a brown suit, with a uniform in a suitcase. A military policeman beckoned him into a room labelled "Internal Security,” from which he shortly reappeared in uniform under escort.

He shouted to the correspondent ‘Dad goes out, I go in.” RUSSIAN COMMENT

The Moscow newspaper “Izvestia” said the legal procedure at the Nuremberg trial fulfilled the most exacting requirements. The court sometimes displayed even excessive scrupulousness in guaranteeing defendants their rights of defence. Nevertheless the judges' leniency in acquitting von Papen, Schacht and Fritsche was certain to arouse regret and perplexity. The Tribunal’s refusal to declare the Hitler Government and the German High Command criminal organisations was also inexplicable.