Panthers in the Streets

Hugo Werner was a tough, bossy German kid who liked to play cowboys and Indians. When his father was killed in an Allied air raid on Munich in 1943, twelve-year-old Hugo was shipped off to a children's camp in the country. There, as Hitler's armies crumbled, dark-eyed little Hugo recruited an army of his own; he called it the Panther Bande. One morning last week Hugo Werner, 22, and seven of his Panthers shuffled awkwardly into a Munich courtroom and went on trial for a series of three cold-blooded murders.

Amid the ruins of postwar Munich, thousands of homeless and hungry kids like the Panthers hung around U.S. Army camps, begging food and money, stealing when they could not beg. The Panthers were more resourceful than most. In the summer of 1946, the Panthers dug up a formidable arsenal of pistols, carbines and even one light machine gun abandoned by the Wehrmacht near Munich.

Young & Silly. They also fell in with a 24-year-old petty criminal named Albrecht Sticht, who persuaded them to rob a service station. But a night watchman foiled the gang and grabbed one of the boys as they tried to get away. In a fiery rage. Werner decided to kill Sticht. "It's hard to say exactly why," mused Hugo last week. "We were young and silly then. Sticht had joined our gang later and we didn't trust him." At Werner's orders, Sticht was lured to a lonely house and shot in the back of the neck; then the kids hid his body in a pile of rubble. That was murder No. 1

While the gang was getting rid of Sticht, police were questioning the Panther captured at the gas station. He named names; the whole gang was rounded up, and all were sentenced to two years in reform school. Not one Panther mentioned the murder of Sticht. When they got out in 1949, Werner drew up a constitution for the gang: "Security for all members, adequate living standards, 1,500,000 Deutsche Mark ($357,143) to be amassed by all possible means, legal or illegal. . . treason to Panther Bande punishable by death." The document was signed in blood. Werner lost no time putting the new constitution into effect: he promptly killed the boy who had tattled. Thus cleansed, the gang went into action. They held up a cigar store, tried to kill a bank messenger (whose briefcase proved to be empty) and stuck up a small Munich hotel. Their take was next to nothing.

In 1951, a youngster named Erich Reuthner joined the band and told his mates that his uncle had a cache of money at home. The Panther Bande surrounded the uncle's house, called out his name, and when he appeared, shot and killed him. Overcome by remorse. Erich tried to commit suicide by shooting himself in the stomach; in his hospital bed later, he told police all. A month later the Panthers were all in jail once more.

Wrong & Evil. Awaiting trial, Chief Panther Werner wrote to a friend: "I can stand up to what I did. I shall not waver . . . I thought too much and got caught in the labyrinth . . . I can see today that what has happened was wrong and evil. We lived in tragic madness and believed the world to be essentially evil. Today I know this to be an oversimplification."

Whatever the court decided, Werner's life of "tragic madness" would not be snuffed out by the state; Germany's constitution, unlike the Panther Bande's, forbids capital punishment.

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