"Against the People"

The Nuernberg International Military Tribunal acquitted three top Nazis--Radio Spokesman Hans Fritzsche, Banker Hjalmar Schacht, Diplomat Franz von Papen--of war crimes. In Nuernberg last week, the lantern-jawed Fritzsche found his fellow Germans less forgiving. A denazification court sentenced Fritzsche to nine years at hard labor for "political crimes against the German people," stripped him of civil rights and property (including the privilege of ever, again owning an automobile).

Before another all-German denazification tribunal, foxy old Papen was making a belligerent defense. The prosecution contended that he had forged the Hindenburg will which aided Hitler's accession to power; Papen hotly denied it, later broke down and wept because "nobody would believe him." His prospects of acquittal were not noticeably brightened when a sympathizer's bomb exploded harmlessly in the office of the court's president, Camil Sachs.

Banker Schacht was either sick or stalling. His attorney reported that the onetime Reich Finance Minister had undergone an operation for a "serious rupture," but denazification officials in Frankfurt still hoped to try him by mid-February. In view of Fritzsche's sentence, most observers guessed that Schacht would mend slowly.

In Munich, Heinrich Hoffman, Hitler's official photographer, admitted that he had realized a fortune of $800,000 from his Reich picture books, had even sold 10,000 photos of Hitler to the French during the occupation. Hoffman, who had aided the Allied prosecution at Nuernberg, got a ten-year sentence from his fellow Germans.

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