Justice Denied

Some of the most notorious Nazi war criminals have escaped justice because West German judges have permitted unconscionably long trial delays. That is the accusation made by Hermann Langbein, 60, an Austrian Jew who survived Auschwitz and is now secretary of the International Concentration Camp Committee, which documents and tries to secure punishment for Nazi crimes. In the committee's quarterly bulletin Langbein charges that West German judges have gone out of their way to accept defense excuses for postponement, often causing trials to be delayed for a decade or more. Items:

> Horst Wagner, 66, an SS member of the German Foreign Office, was allegedly responsible for transporting Jews from occupied countries outside the Third Reich to concentration camps. He was arrested in 1958, but it took German prosecutors nine years to prepare the case for trial. The date was finally set for May 1968, but since then Wagner, who is out on bail, has won one postponement after another by changing attorneys and claiming ill health. Last July he underwent an eye operation three days before his long-delayed trial was to begin.

> Dr. Horst Schumann, 66, a medical experimenter at Auschwitz, was extradited from Ghana in 1966. His trial in 1970 was interrupted because he was suffering from high blood pressure. No new date has been set.

> Dr. Werner Best, 68, was accused of complicity in the murder of 8,723 Poles. The case against him, set for last February, was temporarily discontinued by a vacation-replacement court. Last August the case was dropped entirely because of Best's "old age."

> Dr. Johannes Thuemmler, 66, Gestapo chief of Katowice and president of the infamous Auschwitz Summary Court, has never been brought to trial because West German prosecutors declared themselves unable to assemble sufficient material from Poland to present a case. A German journalist, however, recently traveled to Poland and gathered enough material on Thuemmler to write a 1-hr. 40-min. television documentary about his alleged atrocities.

> Dr. Georg Fleischmann, accused of directing the mass executions of Jews at Smolensk, was arrested in 1965 but never tried. Last July the public prosecutor's office announced that a case against several of Fleischmann's accomplices was finally ready for trial; Fleischmann himself died of natural causes in 1970.

Since the end of the war, West German courts have convicted 6,330 people of war crimes and extended the statute of limitations to provide time to bring others to justice. West German officials acknowledge that delays exist. They blame a shortage of court personnel and the fact that witnesses are frequently too old or nervous to testify reliably, making it necessary to round up corroborative testimony. If witnesses abroad are unable to travel to testify in Germany, a number of delicate international negotiations must be carried out before a German investigating judge can journey to, say, Poland or Israel and question witnesses there. Langbein suggests that there are also other factors at work. Says he: "An Austrian or German was much more likely, by inadvertence or bad luck, to become a jailer than to be inside a concentration camp. The public reaction to the sight of a war criminal in the dock is therefore quite naturally one of 'There but for the grace of God go I.' "

Whatever the motive, one West German court found yet another reason to postpone the trial last month of Dr. Albert Ganzenmueller, 67, who is accused of organizing the railroad cars necessary for mass deportations of Jews to concentration camps. Ganzenmueller's lawyer is involved in another prolonged case, and a Duesseldorf judge ruled that the lawyer "cannot, therefore, be expected to defend his client before the end of the first trial." If other courts follow that lead, all an accused Nazi needs to do to escape trial is choose a busy lawyer.

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