Forget-me-nots

In the vine-covered county hall at ancient Ahrweiler, a U.S. military trial commission last week heard the story of a crime and gave the Germans a sample of U.S. justice.

A U.S. flyer, still unidentified, parachuted into a wheatfield near the town of Preist last Aug. 15. His parachute caught in a tree, and the flyer had a hard time getting down. A 74-year-old farmer, Nicholas Nospe, was working in the wheatfield and saw what happened next.

A crowd gathered. Crippled Peter Back, the local Nazi leader, rode up on his motor bike. When the flyer reached the ground, Back shot him in the head, twice. Back was shouting "Shoot him! Beat him to death!" The flyer was still alive when blond, one-armed Peter Kohn, a railway worker who had been discharged from the Wehrmacht, sprang from the crowd and beat the prostrate man with a club. Matthias Gierens, a small, hard-faced crane operator in whose family there had been insanity, crushed the flyer's skull with a heavy hammer. Matthias Krein, a home guardsman, watched and did nothing to stop the murder.

The old farmer, Nospe, protested that the flyer was entitled to protection as a prisoner of war. Back snarled at him: "You can bury him and put forget-me-nots on his grave."

Last week Kohn, Gierens and Krein went to trial (Back had not been found). Their counsel was a German lawyer designated by the commission.* He pleaded that Kohn's nerves had been shattered in the war and that he had fallen for Goebbels' propaganda. Gierens, said the lawyer, was insane; Krein had merely followed Back's orders.

The judge advocate, a U.S. major, lectured the accused on the Ten Commandments, the laws of decency, German regulations on treatment of prisoners, and the Hague Convention. Pending review by higher authorities, the commission withheld its verdict. At trial's end, the German lawyer leaned toward his three charges and whispered:

"Bethink yourselves. You have sinned against godliness and the laws of your fatherland. Farewell."

*A tribunal of U.S. officers, but not a court-martial, set up especially to try civilians for crimes against the military. Courts-martial try such offenders as three German soldiers who sneaked into U.S. lines in U.S. uniforms. Later they were caught, tried and shot as spies (see cut).

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