Vengeance, French

No word occurred more often in Nurnberg's testimony than the word "death." It buzzed through the quadrilingual earphones: "Tod . . . mort . . . smert . . . death." It screamed from the piles of transcribed Nazi speeches: "Death for the Poles! . . . death for the Russians! . . . death for the Jews! . . . death for the traitors! . . ." But in the six weeks the U.S. and British prosecutors had taken to present their meticulous case, no one had spoken of death for the defendants.

Last week, the French took over. To the rostrum stepped Franc,ois de Menthon, a mild-looking law professor with a scraggly mustache and professorially stooped shoulders, who had been a member of the French underground and was now chief French prosecutor at Nuernberg. In a daylong oration he opened France's case, which deals with slave labor, looting and atrocities in six occupied countries. Said he: "A tortured peoples' craving for justice is the basic foundation of France's call. . . ."

To De Menthon, the 20 Boches in the dock were not the only guilty ones. The entire German people was to blame, he declared, for Naziism merely had exploited their "power of latent barbarism . . . one of the deepest and most tragic facets of the German soul. . . . Certain of their eternal and deep-seated aspirations have found monstrous expressions under the Hitler regime; their entire responsibility is involved. . . . Their re-education is indispensable."

As their first lesson, he bluntly recommended the death sentence for all of Nuernberg's defendants. The 20 stared at the angry Frenchman, their faces suddenly sagging and grave.

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