Crime & Punishment

As master of prewar Germany's largest privately owned coal, iron and steel empire, Friedrich Flick was "the greatest single power behind the Nazi war machine." At Nurnberg last week, haggard, white-haired Friedrich Flick, 64, became the first German businessman convicted by the U.S. war crimes tribunal. For exploiting slave labor, looting industries in occupied countries and collaborating with Himmler's SS, he got seven years.

The sentence might have been stiffer if Flick and associates had not risked trouble with the Nazis by feeding, housing and clothing, their slave laborers better than the law decreed. Presiding Judge Charles B. Sears of Buffalo, N.Y., also found "some shade of justification" in Flick's plea that German industry itself was being persecuted in his person. As for the $40,000 yearly payments to the Nazi Party, Judge Sears said it was perhaps "not too high a premium to insure personal safety in the fearful days of the Third Reich."

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