Old Crimes

The young captain on the bridge of Kaiser Wilhelm II's yacht Hohenzollern had ambitions to match those of his master: both wanted to bust the bully-bold British Navy. In World War I Hamburg-born Erich Raeder, promoted to chief of staff in the Kaiser's brand-new cruiser squadrons, had a brief taste of glory in the battles of Doggerbank and Jutland (in which the British were powerfully mauled), but at war's end the barnacled fleet had to scuttle itself to avoid capture. Returning from Versailles. Raeder said: "Just wait 25 years. We'll be back." In half that time Raeder was building pocket battleships for Hitler, who made him an honorary member of the Nazi Party. But in World War II, when his battleships proved no more decisive than those of the Kaiser, Hitler fired him, made submarine-warring Karl Doenitz grand admiral of the German fleet. Following Hitler's defeat, Raeder was tried as a top war criminal, sentenced to life imprisonment. Said proud, glory-loving Raeder in a special plea to the Allied Control Council: "I prefer a soldierly death sentence to languishing in prison." Last week, after languishing in Berlin's Spandau jail for nine years, Erich Raeder, 79, and suffering from hardening of the arteries, was set free on a clemency order signed by the four Allied powers. Wearing the same dark blue serge suit he had worn when the Russians captured him in 1945, high-buttoned shoes, grey suede gloves and blue-patterned tie, he drove off to see friends, and to receive the congratulations of the German Navy Association. Asked if he had any political plans for the future, Raeder said with a huff and a grin: "For God's sake, no! That is the very last thing I need." Raeder was released at the request of the West German government, which wants to give its new army a clean start by removing the war crimes onus from men whom most Germans generally considered to have been upright soldiers.

Raeder's claim to this distinction could not be shared by the five top war criminals he left behind him in Spandau: one time Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess, Hitler Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach, Munitions-Maker Albert Speer, former Reichsbank President Walther Funk and Doenitz. But in other prisons under British, French and U.S. control, there are still 104 lesser war criminals whose status is now likely to come under review.

The war crimes system was made to seem particularly unjust in German eyes last week by the climax of the case of notorious Nazi War Propagandist Werner Naumann. Onetime righthand man to Goebbels, Naumann went underground in 1945 and stayed there through the bitter de-Nazification period, emerging only when new laws enabled him to escape being labeled a major offender. An unrepenting Hitlerite, he was soon active in neo-Nazi circles. Arrested by the British in 1953 for "endangering the occupation," he was deprived of the right to make public speeches, write for the press, broadcast or hold public office. But the transfer of sovereignty to the West German government invalidated the case against Naumann. Notified of this, unregenerate Nazi Naumann returned to active politics last week, an example to all Germans of the difference between the smart and the dumb war criminal.

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