Eight Years' Wait

Eight Years' Wait Eight years is a long time to delay a criminal trial, but it is not too long to wait to catch a criminal. A French military commission in Alsace at the time of its recapture from the Germans in 1944-45 uncovered a ghastly prison camp where some 20,000 people had been used as guinea pigs in Nazi medical experiments.

Known as Struthof-Natzweiler, the camp, hidden in a thick wood in the Vosges foothills, was equipped with a "laboratory," where prisoners were inoculated with plague, typhus and leprosy germs, blinded, gassed and otherwise deliberately injured, so that their sick and dying spasms could be observed through glass windows by German "professors." Since then, though the French have searched far & wide for the Struthof professors, they have caught only three. Last week in Metz, a French military court heard the Struthof case. Said Dr. Otto Bickenbach, onetime Heidelberg faculty member, accused of giving poison gas to prisoners: "I could have dropped these experiments, but I found myself on the front lines, so to speak, of the war. and I never wanted to drop the experiments.

If it [the war and the need] was to begin again, I would want to begin again." Bickenbach was sentenced to life imprisonment, as was Dr. Eugen Haagen, accused of anti-typhus experiments on prisoners; a third professor was acquitted.

But the two chief Struthof monsters, Professor August Hirt, SS director of the camp, and Dr. Helmuth Ruhl, are still at large. Tried in absentia, they were sentenced to death.

In another French military court last week, seven of 21 accused were also being tried in absentia, and for the same reason: the French had not been able to lay hands on them. One by one, in quiet, choked, or angry voices, 187 witnesses had told their stories of the Gestapo torture chamber in the Rue de la Pompe in Paris (TIME, Dec.1). When Witness Jacques Benoist tearfully began shouting. Judge Robert Chadefaux cautioned: "You promised to testify without hate. Try to be calm." Retorted Benoist: "It is hard, Monsieur le President, after eight years, to remember these things and to see these men still alive before me." Benoist did not have long to wait. Last week the court sentenced 15 of the accused to death, including a rubber-hose expert, Georges Guicciardini and his son Adrien; three, including another son, null were sentenced to hard labor for life. Stenographer Denise Delfau (who had coolly taken down the testimony of the tortured as they writhed) got 20 years' hard labor.

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