Judging the Judges

Since the Nurnberg trials, hundreds of former Nazi officers, soldiers, industrialists, physicians and other civilians have been convicted of war crimes in German courts. The Germans have just tracked down Treblinka Camp Commander Franz Stangl, who has been extradited from Brazil. They still have hopes of finding Josef Mengele, the camp doctor accused of experimenting on thousands of people at Auschwitz, and the biggest quarry of all, Hitler Deputy Martin Bormann. Yet the men who knowingly gave many of Hitler's acts their legal veneer, the Nazi judges, have escaped prosecution, claiming that they were simply upholding the laws, no matter how inhumane. Last week, in a case that could affect many former members of Hitler's judicial system, the first Nazi judge ever tried in a German court was convicted of war crimes.

Former People's Court Judge Hans Joachim Rehse, 64, a member of Hitler's highest political tribunal, was sentenced to five years in jail for levying "unjustifiable death sentences." As a judicial consultant to the People's Court from 1941 to 1945, Rehse lived up to the letter of Nazi law, which called upon the courts to act "not as men of justice whose eyes are masked. The court must view the idea and purposes of the state leadership as primary, and the fate of human beings as secondary."

Thus, in 373 cases tried by the People's Court during Rehse's tenure, 231 death sentences were handed down.

Among the condemned were Actor Walther Bethke (1943) and the Rev. Josef Muller (1944), who were executed for cracking private jokes about Hitler. A country doctor was sentenced to death simply for telling a pregnant patient that she was courageous to have a baby in the fifth year of the war--an aspersion, as the court saw it, on Nazi chances of victory. When Lawyer Reinhart Freiherr von Godin wrote a letter consoling the sister of a friend condemned by the court, Von Godin too was arrested and executed for "slandering the people and the Reich."

After the war, Rehse settled in West Germany with his wife and daughter, and in 1956 managed to win a judgeship in the Schleswig-Holstein state court--only to lose it eleven months later when his past caught up with him. By 1962, as pressure began building for action against the untouched Nazi jurists, Schleswig-Holstein authorities opened an investigation of Rehse. Finally, last February, they arrested him. Rehse, who pleaded not guilty on grounds that he did not make the laws, plans to appeal his sentence. For Rehse, that is a rare privilege--his own People's Court never permitted appeals.

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