Anyone Is Guilty

The faces told the story. For all their bestial apathy, for all the unfolding record of their deeds at Belsen and Oswiecim, the men and women in the dock at Luneburg were human, and theirs were human crimes.

It was generally true, as Joseph Kramer, Irma Grese and their lesser co-defendants said, that they had obeyed orders ("Anyone in the SS is as guilty as anyone else"). A corollary truth, hard for the occupiers to grasp, was that the basic crime--Naziism--was not an individual but a national crime. Since this was so, the German people could never really be convinced that the national crimes of Naziism were crimes at all.

At Lueneburg, undeterred by such considerations, the British prosecutors last week rested their cases against Kramer & Co. For reasons and in a fashion totally incomprehensible to the Germans, British defense attorneys then did their human duty.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.