GERMAN WAR CRIMINAL

Waikato Times, Volume 93, Issue 14535, 6 December 1920, Page 6

GERMAN WAR CRIMINAL

POSITION OF THE EX-KAISER. LIGHT SENTENCES BY FRENCH JUDGES. (From our London Correspondent.) LONDON, September 30. While the air-raids were in progress, certain obedient London coroners refused to accept juries' verdicts of wilful murder against the Kaiser. Other coroners—voluntarily or because juries persisted in their rights —did accept such verdicts, but no warrant was issued for the man's arrest. Whether if such a warrant had been issued we should have had the right to ask the Dutch Government first for its execution and next for the extradition of the offender, we have never heard discussed. It is not a question of the Kaiser not being a British subject, for if a Frenchman committed murder here and escaped to Holland, the police of that country would hold him if they caught him, and hand him over to us in due course. These points are not discussed, but what is always a good deal canvassed is the nonfulillment of the Government's valiant promise that the Kaiser would be punished. Even men who stand strongly for the general principle of a Slate's sovereignty are disposed to ask whether a high expediency rather- than respect for the rights of the Netherlands Government ■—whose pluck is admired —should not have marked our attitude in an endeavour that nothing was to deny to get William Hohcnzollern by the scruff of the neck. For long some of us had hoped that 'private enterprise" might ha,ve been equal to the task —that one fine day when William was cutting up trees an airman would snap him up as a considered trifle; or that in the middle of sonj£ gloomy night he might be hustled, bedclothes and all, into a wailing motor-car. That the whole world should look on helplessly while this barefaced ruffian lives a life of esse as the guest of a friendly Queen and her Government and people is rather more than an anomaly. It is good to know this week that a Lille court-martial has been busy with cases of other German blackguards, who did not appear, and for whom, it seems, no extradition law at present existng iias any terrors. One cannot say that the French judges were severe. In the case of Count von Jinnich, who killed a priest and threw his body into a coalhole, the sentence was five years' imprisonment—about what we give here to a mere apprentice burglar. Imprisonment for life was decreed against Lieutenant Seize, for theft, desecration of graves and throw:ng into prison a girl who had repeatedly rejected his detestable advances.