Hitler's Legacy is the first comprehensive, historical look at the ex-Nazi legacy in Germany from 1945 until the present day in
any language. The author, as he stresses the major controversies engendered by the reappearance of Nazis in key positions,
also looks at many of the other problems the Germans faced in resolving their Nazi legacy. The occupation and war crimes trials
fulfilled the allies' need for a sense of justice while they fueled German resentment. Many important Nazis regained responsible
positions relatively quickly. An even greater proportion, including those at the pinnacle of the Hitler hierarchy, eventually
received generous pensions from the postwar German exchequer.

Perhaps the most striking episode of favoritism towards ex- Nazis was the Heyde-Sawade affair. Werner Heyde, a neurologist,
had been a coordinator of the Nazi program to physically eliminate those whom they considered inadequate to be part of the
new "master race." In 1947, Heyde escaped from American custody. Using forged documents Heyde crafted a new identity.
German authorities in Schleswig-Holstein, even though they knew his real identity, granted Heyde under his alias Fritz Sawade,
the right to earn tidy statutory fees as a medical evaluator for the social courts. The public disclosure of these facts resulted in a
major scandal in 1959. Heyde, on 13 February, 1964, just five days before he was due to stand trial for his Nazi era actions,
committed suicide. This is the first full treatment of this story.

Two short biographies summarize the careers of important Nazi officials who reemerged to play major roles in the postwar
West German republic. Hans Globke was a faceless but effective bureaucrat in the Nazi interior ministry who helped draft the
Nuremberg racial purity decrees in 1935 and wrote the official legal commentary on them. This did not prevent him from
becoming the permanent secretary and chief administrative right hand man to the first postwar chancellor of Germany, Konrad
Adenauer, whom Globke loyally served during his entire 14 year term in office.

The other person profiled is Theodor Oberländer, still alive today at age 93. During the Nazi era, he was one of the leading
exponents of German expansion eastwards. He espoused a divide and rule method, favoring certain nationalities, particularly
Ukrainians, as opposed to other nationalities he particularly despised, notably Poles and Jews, both of whom he indicated
should be eliminated. After 1945, Oberländer became a spokesman for Germans deported from the forfeited eastern provinces
and from Czech territories.

In 1953, Adenauer appointed him cabinet minister to defend the interests of those exiles. His role in the chancellor's governing
system was to gain the loyalty of former eastern residents and ex- fascists. On 29 April, 1996, Cologne prosecutors revealed
that they were again investigating allegations that Oberländer participated in the massacres Nazi forces carried out when they
seized the Polish/Ukrainian city of Lwów (Lviv) on 29 June, 1941, based on information from files kept by the former East
German regime.

It also includes the first brief, comprehensive summary of major West German war crimes trials held since 1945. It also
examines efforts of ex-Nazis to prevent the truth from emerging. They hoped to sanitize their own reputations and the historical
record of the Nazi regime. It is the first comprehensive look at the ex- Nazi legacy in Germany in any language.

INTRODUCTION

The introduction comes directly to grips with the material, beginning with a discussion of Heinz Reinefarth. He was the SS
general and Nazi police official in charge of the brutal suppression of the Polish Home Army (KOR) rising in Warsaw in August,
1944. British authorities captured him in 1945. They refused to hand him over to the Poles because they deemed his knowledge
of Communists and eastern nationalities too valuable.

After being exonerated by a postwar denazification tribunal, Reinefarth went into politics. In 1951, the town council of
Westerland, the North Sea resort town, unanimously elected him mayor. In 1958, Reinefarth gained entry into the Schleswig-
Holstein parliament as a member of the rightwing BHE party. The East German propaganda office had produced a film in 1957
exposing Reinefarth's Nazi career. Though local prosecutors opened a file on him, they never charged him with anything even
though they knew that he had coordinated massacres of Polish women and children.

The introduction then shifts to an examination of excuses for the Nazi Reich. Apologists have focussed on the Cold War and
have suggested that Stalinism was a greater evil than, or even a cause of Nazism. Especially in light of the collapse of the East
German regime in 1989, it is inevitable that the later tyranny will be compared with the Nazi regime, but as a modern
manifestation of raw tribalism, the Nazi state, in our western history, is an evil beyond serious comparison. The Hitler experience
revealed that a major western country could degenerate into an outrageous form of barbarism while still retaining some of the
outward appearance of civilization.

                  THE POSTWAR FRAMEWORK OF THE NEW GERMANY

The United States, not the Soviet Union, was the chief proponent of the strictest denazification program. The Cold War soon
softened US policy. Anti-Communism favored the view that the Nazis had fought the real Stalinist enemy. A natural evolution of
policy from punishment towards rebuilding also created a climate less hostile towards former Nazis.

While the major crimes of the regime are touched upon, the stress is on the German administrative elite because it was the return
to prominence of Nazi jurists and administrators that generated the ex-Nazi problem after 1945. Most of the key officials of the
postwar West German state accepted the view that Nazi operatives had done their "duty" no matter what that "duty had
entailed. According to the Prussian bureaucratic tradition, officials owed the state a personal allegiance above and beyond any
constitution or system in place at any given time.

Former Nazis reappeared first in the legal system. The allies quickly reappointed many of them, believing that their expertise
was necessary to restore necessary stability. Nazi jurists blazed a trail for the reappointment of other Nazi officials by
establishing how rules restricting their reemployment were to be applied. The decision of West Germany's first chancellor,
Konrad Adenauer, to rule in opposition to rather than in coalition with the Social Democrats also favored ex-Nazis. To achieve
a majority opposed to the Socialists, Adenauer had to mollify ex fascists.

Nazi problems affected the creation of the new West German military. The creation, at the behest of the allies, of West German
spying agencies resulted in similar problems. The man the allies had insisted be appointed head of the West German domestic
security agency, Otto John, became the source of a crisis when he was either kidnapped or defected eastwards in 1954. He
gave a press conference in East Belin claiming that West Germany had been "renazified."

Limits on West German tolerance for renazification were revealed by incidents occurring in 1955. Protests by students and
academics at Goettingen University prevented the appointment of Schlueter, a fascist sympathizer, as education minister of
Niedersachsen that summer. Later that year, federal authorities were embarrassed by the controversy over their reemployment
of ex Nazi propagandist, Eberhard Taubert.

                             THE RETURN OF NAZI OFFICIALS

West German law set a quota earmarking one fifth of government jobs to former officials of the Nazi regime. This created a
major problem of ex-Nazi police officials, prefects and prosecutors. The police chief of Rheinland-Pfalz, Georg Heuser, had to
resign in 1959 when it was discovered that he had commanded a Nazi death squad in Belorussia. Wilhelm Harster, an ex-SS
Gruppenfuehrer convicted of war crimes in Holland and not freed until the 1950s, was offered a job as prefect in Bavaria when
he was deported from Holland.

Leo Drach and Robert Wienecke were convicted by postwar Luxembourg courts for the judicial murders of resistance figures
during the Nazi occupation. Drach was deported after serving his sentence. Wienecke neglected to return to jail from a furlough.
Both were hired and later promoted by prosecution authorities in Rheinland-Pfalz, the German province which borders
Luxembourg.

In 1962 the West German justice ministry appointed Wolfgang Immerwahr Fraenkel as chief prosecutor. Fraenkel, despite his
middle name meaning "always true", lied to the justice minister about his Nazi era record. At that time he had been a specialist in
obtaining death sentences against individuals whom lower courts had acquitted or given prison terms, usually for trifling offenses.
When the East Germans disclosed his record within several months of his nomination, he had to be dismissed. Now in his 90s,
he has, for the last 35 years, received a generous pension based on that failed appointment.

Fraenkel's pension has been no anomaly. Authorities have been particularly generous in awarding pensions to former Nazi
officials or their heirs. The widows of Hermann Goering and Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler's second in command, were both
generously supported by the Bonn exchequer. Refusals to award such pensions have been so rare that they are newsworthy.
The pensions paid to the former Nazi justice minister, Franz Schlegelberger, a model for Kubrick's film, Judgment at
Nuremberg, and Ernst Lautz, the dreaded prosecutor of the Nazi "People's Court" (Volksgericht) generated major
controversies. Both were convicted by US authorities at the Nuremberg trial of Nazi jurists.

In light of the need to restore its reputation, the postwar German foreign office would have been well advised to keep prominent
Nazis out of diplomatic positions. Instead there was a wholesale return of Nazi diplomats. At the end of the 1950s, 72 of
Bonn's 83 ambassadors had earlier served the Nazi Ribbentrop foreign ministry. Diplomats involved in the Nazi extermination
effort, such as Ernst Mohr and Werner von Grundherr, were again representing the German state. Another important figure at
the Bonn foreign office, Wilhelm Grewe, had not been employed by Ribbentrop's foreign ministry, but had, however, written the
semi- official article explaining why the Wehrmacht did not need to apply the Geneva convention to Soviet POW's.

The Cold War provided another stage for ex-Nazis: their reemployment in the "political justice" system recreated by West
German authorities. This system of political policing directed 95% of its energies against Communists, pacifists, or other leftwing
sympathisers. It was largely carried out by the same personnel who had performed that function for the Nazi regime. The
remaining five per cent of the effort, directed at unrepentant Nazis, served to legitimize the 95 per cent. The Bonn government's
attempt to ban the VVN, a Communist influenced organization of victims of the Nazi regime, is examined as a case study.

The chapter closes by comparing reunified Germany's treatment of former East German officials to postwar West Germany's
overly lenient treatment of former operatives of the Nazi regime. Post 1989 courts established reasonable guidelines permitting
the reemployment of many East Germans, but set reasonable limits against reemploying those most culpable.

                         THEODOR OBERLÄNDER, ADENAUER'S EX-NAZI

Oberländer managed the refugee and ex-Nazi votes for the Adenauer coalition. A prominent "east expert" during the Nazi era,
he was appointed in 1953 to head up the ministry channeling West German money to former residents of the lost provinces. He
had to resign in 1960 as a result of East German accusations that, as a political advisor to a Ukrainian quisling unit in the Nazi
invasion of the Soviet Union, he had organized the murder of a number of Polish professors at the city of Lwow.

They were unable to substantiate those charges, though it was almost certain that members of Oberländer's unit took part in
massacres occurring in the city at that time. It may be significant that Cologne prosecutors announced in 1996 that they were
taking a second look at the East German files generated by the case. Oberländer never could deny that he had been an
important Nazi eastern theoretician.

He benefited at first from the favor of Nazi Gauleiter Erich Koch. Once they became rivals, links with other prominent Nazis,
including Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, protected Oberländer's status as professor. Koch, on trial in Poland in
1959, gained a measure of revenge by suggesting that Oberländer had organized the murder of the Lwow professors.

Though he was cashiered from the Ukrainian unit, he was later put in charge of a Georgian quisling unit when the Nazis invaded
the Caucasus in 1942. Even as the Nazi regime was collapsing early in 1945, Oberländer was appointed to advise General
Vlassov, the ex Soviet general who, after being taken prisoner, took up arms for the Nazi regime.

Oberländer is a convenient starting point to examine ex-Nazi and other rightwing milieus in postwar West German politics. His
early postwar thinking showed little change as a result of the Nazi debacle, which he characterised as the result of the failure of
Nazi authorities to follow his advice. He was one of the founders of the Western (Abendländische) academy, an organization
spearheaded by prominent rightwing publicists in postwar Germany. Other prominent members included Baron von der Heydte,
a catholic supporter of the Nazi regime who became a law professor at Würzburg after 1945. He was the person who lodged
the complaint against Spiegel which resulted in the raid on the magazine's headquarters by West German authorities in 1962.

Oberländer became the spokesman for those exiled from provinces lost to the Reich in 1945. They made up one fifth of the
West German population in the 1950s. A political party, the BHE, was created to represent the interests of these exiles. Its
other leaders are also profiled. British proconsul Ivone Kirkpatrick described Waldemar Kraft, the first chairman of the party,
as unsavory. Another party leader, Wilhelm Stuckart, had been the state secretary to Wilhelm Frick, the Nazi interior minister.

Once the chancellor appointed him deportees minister in 1953, Oberländer became a good soldier for Adenauer. He deserted
BHE in 1955 to join the chancellor's party because the BHE opposed Adenauer's Saar policy. Oberländer appointed ex- Nazi
cronies to the key positions in his ministry. Those individuals, Gerhard Wolfrum, Werner Ventzki and the others are also
profiled. We also consider the prolonged controversy which resulted in Oberländer's dismissal and the 1960 East Berlin
showtrial in some detail. The scandal epitomised on a grand scale other Bonn controversies concerning the reemergence of
prominent Nazis.

Oberlaender's date of departure, his 55th birthday, was based on pension considerations. His efforts to return to the limelight
became almost comical at times. Throughout his long retirement he has, with only limited success, confronted those who would
expose his record in court. He gained a measure of satisfaction by outlasting the East German regime which had made him a
propaganda target.

                    HANS GLOBKE: CIVIL FOOTSOLDIER FOR THE NAZI REICH

Hans Maria Globke was the administrative right hand man of the first chancellor of West Germany, Konrad Adenauer, from
1949 to 1963. He had an earlier career as an important official in the interior ministry of the Nazi Reich. He began his career
before 1933 but made a rapid advance through the bureaucratic ranks during the Nazi era. Beginning in 1935, Globke was
assistanat to Wilhelm Stuckart, the permanent secretary to Wilhelm Frick, the Nazi minister of the interior executed after his
conviction by the Nuremberg tribunal in 1946.

Globke testified in Stuckart's defense at the American trial of key Nazi administrators at Nuremberg in 1948. Globke
personified the good administrative soldier of the Nazi era who got along by going along. In 1935, he helped to draft the
Nuremberg racial purity laws rendering Jews non-persons. He wrote the semi-official commentary expanding their scope in
1936. In 1938 he came up with the idea of printing a "J" on the passports of Jews to distinguish them from gentiles. He also
drafted the decree requiring Jews to take the forenames "Israel" or "Sarah" if they changed their names.

As the citizenship expert in the Reich interior ministry, Globke saw to it that Jews were stripped of their nationality in order to
maintain a legal facade as they were shipped to Auschwitz. He drafted punitive peace terms for Vichy France, but the defeat of
the Nazi regime prevented them from taking effect. The terms would have forced Vichy authorities to deport non-European
Frenchmen to their lands of origin.

In the postwar era he became Adenauer's chief personnel advisor. He tended to look down upon those who had gone into exile
during the Nazi era, favoring former Nazi officials such as Karl Vialon, the financial expert in Rosenberg's "East Ministry" based
on the competence he had shown working for the Nazi regime. Globke, the chancellor's man responsible for west German
intelligence, also supervised Bonn's propaganda effort. He was also instrumental in Adenauer's effort to secure more complete
control over his governing coalition. Because Adenauer stuck Globke, he stayed in place despite criticisms of his Nazi era
record. First expressed by West German opponents of the chancellor, they later were taken up by East German propagandists.

Another scandal, involving Globke's Nazi era associate Rolf Schiedermair threw light on Globke's wartime record, since it
revealed that he had directed the "sixth office" in the Nazi interior ministry dealing with "racial" policies. Schiedermair's case also
reveals the corrupt favouritism exhibited by some ex-Nazi judges during the Adenauer era.

Globke's Nazi era record became a continuing target for hostile researchers. The East Germans carried on a propaganda
campaign against him which culminated in a show trial staged in July, 1963. By that time, however, they were flogging a dying
horse because, because Globke's retirement date, that of the chancellor's 15 October, 1963, was already known.

Even before he retired, Globke had embarked on another career, as an expert witness for Nazi offenders in war crimes trials.
He sometimes made absurd statements. He denied having known the meaning of the term "final solution" during the Nazi era. In
other testimony he gave his rationale for his actions during the Nazi era: he had the right to do what was necessary to survive a
dictatorship. He died in 1973.

                                  ALLIED WAR CRIMES TRIALS

This chapter reviews war crimes trials conducted by the allied victors and other nations victimized by the Nazi regime.
Germany's own trials of Nazi offenders can only be fully understood in the context of these trials. Planning for the allied trials
began before the surrender of the Hitler regime. They have continued until the present day. The French are, at present, still
trying a Vichy collaborator, ex vice prefect Maurice Papon.

We briefly summarize the Nuremberg trial, prosecuted jointly by the four victorious allies in 1945-46. There was no historical
precedent for such a comprehensive trial of the losers by the winners, but the crimes of the Nazi regime fueled a demand for
justice. Perhaps the most important "war crimes" trials ever prosecuted were the series of 12 prosecutions by US authorities,
also held at Nuremberg, after the original allied trial. These trials underscored the complicity of every major element of the
German elite in the crimes of the Nazi regime.

In the United States, homegrown rightwing elements led by Senator Joe McCarthy among others, spearheaded opposition to
the Nuremberg trials and other US prosecutions of Nazi criminals. The Wisconsin senator defended the SS killers who had
gunned down US GI's at Malmedy, Belgium, when the Nazis broke through the American lines in the Ardennes in December,
1944.

We also briefly consider the British and French war crimes trials. Britain's trial of the Belsen concentration camp guards in 1945
was the first trial to expose the Nazi concentration camp system. Other defendants the British convicted included Field Marshals
Kesselring and Manstein. The French, occupied by the Nazis from 1940 to 1944, expended most of their prosecution effort
against their own collaborators. They also acted against Nazis who had acted against French victims, such as SS police officials
Carl Oberg and Helmut Knochen and Nazi proconsul Otto Abetz. Their prosecution of Klaus Barbie in 1987 is well known.

Other Western European prosecutions are briefly touched on. Italy, the axis ally which became an enemy of the Nazis after its
surrender in 1943, was in an ambiguous position as victim and, in some sense, perpetrator at the same time. The brutality of
Nazi authorities after 1943, particularly the Ardeatine caves hostage massacre in March, 1944, which has come to represent
Nazi atrocities in Italy, has continued, down to the present day, to generate war crimes trials. We also briefly touch on the best
known Eastern European trials. Israel's trial of Nazi extermination coordinator Adolf Eichmann, in 1961, was particularly
important because it focussed a later generation of world interest on the crimes of the Nazi regime.

                          DR. WERNER HEYDE ALIAS DR. FRITZ SAWADE

Dr. Werner Heyde, a neurologist, specialized, during the Nazi era, in the elimination of those whom the Nazis considered unfit
because they lacked the requisite intelligence or sanity. Heyde was of mediocre intellectual talent and owed his status to his strict
adherence to the Nazi view of medicine. He hid his own closet sexual deviation from Nazi "perfection."

Far more important than his Nazi era role was his postwar life under the assumed name Fritz Sawade. Officials who appointed
Heyde as a medical assessor to determine whether individuals qualified for the generous disability benefit scheme knew that
"Sawade" was really Heyde. An increasing circle of people learned "Sawade's" real identity as time went on.

The postwar heyde scandal began on 25 July, 1947, when he escaped from American custody. He made his escape by jumping
off an American six by six troop transport as it crawled through the rubble of Würzburg, familiar to Heyde because he had spent
years there as a professor. He then drifted northward to Schleswig- Holstein, near where he had been stationed during the
closing months of the Nazi era. At Kiel, Heyde was able to craft a new identity under the name Fritz Sawade with forged
documents he purchased on the black market at the train station. Local officials at Flensburg, who knew he was Werner Heyde,
urged him to practice medicine under his new alias.

The eminent Schleswig- Holstein neurologist, Jakob Creutzfeldt, a discoverer of the human version of the "mad cow" disease,
was informed that Heyde, as Sawade, was making medical evaluations for Schleswig-Holstein social courts. Creutzfeldt, an
anti-fascist during the Nazi era, demanded that the authorities do something about Heyde. The chief judge of the social court,
Ernst Siegfried Buresch, was able to put Creutzfeldt off and delay the disclosure of Heyde's real identity for another five years.
The nasty secret was finally disclosed when another prominent doctor, Kiel medical professor Adolf Reinwein, complained to
authorities about the inadequacy of the justice system. He alluded to Heyde's well-known imposture when prosecutors refused
to take action against student pranksters who had fired live ammunition into his apartment.

The exposure in November, 1959, of Heyde's imposture initiated a major scandal which ended 51 months later, on 13
February, 1964, when Heyde poisoned himself five days before he was due to stand trial for his role in the Nazi "mercy killing"
program.

                    GERMAN WAR CRIMES TRIALS: I: TO THE END OF THE 1950S

There were successes and failures of German efforts to bring Nazi war criminals to justice. After an introductory look at the
postwar framework, we begin with the early prosecutions of those who carried out the Nazi "mercy killing" program. With the
exception of two Hessen cases involving the Hadamar and Kalmenhof asylums, postwar German justice was too lenient with
"mercy killers". On several occasions, courts held that program participants should not be punished because they had not been
aware of the illegality of what they had been doing. The judges chose to ignore the fact that the participating doctors used
assumed names, and that Nazi officials had developed an elaborate system of forged documents to cover up the real causes of
"euthanasia" victims' deaths.

The next case concerns Walter Müller, a Nazi named as presiding judge of the "special court" at Cologne. He declared that the
head "turnip", of a defendant had to roll because the Gauleiter had insisted upon it. Müller was acquitted because the postwar
judges were not convinced that he had actually induced the "special" court to order the executions.

Similar logic prevented justice being applied to Dr. Gerhard Peters, IG Farben's agent supplying Zyklon B, the gas used in the
Nazi extermination chambers. After two guilty verdicts were overturned on appeal, a third court acquitted Peters. The rationale
for the acquittal was that Peters supposedly did not know what the gas was being used for. This reasoning was contrary to
Peters' testimony and contrary to the evidence considered by the two previous courts considering the case.

A German court at Nürnberg in 1952 stretched the concept of reasonable doubt to acquit Nazi diplomat Franz Rademacher of
all but one minor charge, allowing him to remain free on bail as the case was appealed. The ex-diplomat jumped bail and fled to
Syria. The Syrians later imprisoned Rademacher as a NATO agent, perhaps as a result of a Mossad disinformation campaign.
When they freed him in 1965, he returned to Germany. He was retried and convicted in 1968, but died in 1973, before the
appeals process had run its course.

Ex SS officers Walter Huppenkothen and Otto Thorbeck stood trial on three occasions, but the courts were never able to
satisfactorily dispose of their case. During the waning weeks of the Nazi era, they had been detailed to the Flossenbürg
concentration camp to eliminate former spymaster Wilhelm Canaris and six resistance figures. The SS men staged a bogus "trial"
before their men hung the seven victims. In 1956 the German High Court (BGH) ruled that this ceremony had been enough to
render the murders "legal." The high court judges also held that the killings were "legal" because the Nazi regime had possessed
the right to execute "traitors." The court, in effect, reconvicted the victims.

The trials of SS general Helmut Simon and others also centered on a determination of what was "legal" based on Nazi
guidelines. On 9 April, 1945, the SS general ordered a villager, Hanselmann, to be hung for disarming Hitler youth soldiers in
order to save the village from destruction as the American forces advanced. Two local Nazis refused to follow orders to
countersign orders to shoot Hanselmann because, as they told the SS officers, they would have to continue living in the village
once the SS had departed. When Simon was told of this defiance, he ordered that the two local Nazis be hung as well. Simon
and his associates were acquitted on three occasions. The judges let off each time, stating that what they had done conformed
to Nazi "law." The high court, responding to appeals from the prosecution, ruled otherwise after each trial. Simon died before a
fourth trial could be held.

Three trials in 1958 again revealed the scope of Nazi terror to the German population. At Ulm, an SS officer, Fischer-
Schweder, and nine other members of his death squad faced prosecution. The evidence disclosed at the trial created a
considerable stir in Germany. Later that year, the trial of two Sachsenhausen guards, "Iron Gustav" Sorge and "Pistol" Schubert,
returned from the Soviet Union in 1955, revealed the scope of brutality at that camp. The trial disclosed the existence of
execution barracks where Soviet prisoners, told that they were to be medically examined, were ordered to stand with their
backs to a hole in the wall, through which they were shot. The third trial involved brutal Buchenwald guard Martin Sommer. His
excuse of poor health was finally brushed aside by the court in Bayreuth in 1958. Sommer, who was convicted, was jeered by
the audience in court despite the town's reputation of loyalty to the Nazi regime.

As a result of the publicity generated by the Ulm Einsatzgruppen trial of 1958, the justice ministers of the provincial
governments of Germany jointly created an agency to research and help prosecute Nazi crimes. This agency has usually been
able to marshal the evidence to successfully bring Nazi offenders to justice. In December, 1961, an official with the agency,
Barbara Just- Dahlmann, gave a speech which created a controversy. She revealed that the new organization had become
necessary because the regular police authorities were shot through with ex-Nazis inclined to tip off suspects under suspicion for
war crimes.

                                    TRIALS SINCE THE 1960S

The early 1960s were perhaps the most active era of West German war crimes prosecutions. Those convicted ranged from low
ranking SS killers to the important SS general, Karl Wolff. In 1945, the allies had declined to try him as a quid pro quo for his
early surrender of Nazi forces in northern Italy. Wolff was the SS superior of Adolf Eichmann, the coordinator of the Nazi
Jewish extermination effort.

Perhaps the most successful West German prosecution was the Auschwitz trial, held at Frankfurt from 1963 to 1965. Many of
the highest ranking Nazi figures at Auschwitz had been executed in Poland after trials in 1948. Twenty-two defendants were
tried, including at least two survivors from the Polish trials. Fifteen were convicted. The simultaneous trial in another Frankfurt
courtroom of two accomplices of Adolf Eichmann, Otto Hunsche and Hermann Krumey, was less successful. The judge of that
trial felt that the prosecution had not fully met its burden of proof. The prosecution appealed, as it has a right to do under
German law. In 1969, Hunsche and Krumey were retried and convicted.

During the later 1960s, new left activists became particularly interested in Nazi trials. Judge Hans- Jürgen Oske thus knew that
he was in for trouble on the morning of 12 December, 1968 as he read his verdict exonerating Hans-Joachim Rehse, a judge of
the dreaded Nazi "people's court". Rehse countersigned at least 393 execution orders. One of them involved a priest, Max
Josef Metzger, who had confided his hatred of the Nazi regime to a secret diary revealed to the Gestapo by an informant.
Rehse, who had served from 1956 to 1960 as a temporary judge in Schleswig- Holstein, faced trial as a result of a book
appearing in the 1960s which discussed the Metzger case, among others. Rehse died in 1969 before the case could be retried.

During the 1960s and 1970s German prosecutors held large scale trials against guards of the major extermination camps at
Treblinka, Sobibor and Majdanek. The Majdanek trial, which resulted in convictions for eight of the fifteen defendants,
dgragged on over six years from 1975 to 1981. French Nazi hunter Arno Klarsfeld provided German prosecutors with the
evidence they need to successfully prosecute Lischka, Hagen and Heinrichson, SS operatives instrumental in organizing the
shipment of Jewish victims from France to their deaths at Auschwitz.

Despite the retirement of ex-Nazi judges, German courts were still prone to leniency in cases against those who had carried out
Nazi "euthanasia" killings. In the case against Klaus Endruweit and others, the judges admitted that the defendants were "legally
guilty" but let them off because their loyalty to the Nazi state had rendered them unable to distinguish between right and wrong.
The record of such trials in recent years continues to be mixed. Important Nazis have continued to employ the excuse of "poor
health" to avoid conviction or escape punishment after conviction.

SS killer Josef Schwammberger, born in 1912, was finally convicted in 1992. He had avoided trial for many years by fleeing to
Argentina in 1948. The Argentine authorities deported him in 1990. Wehrmacht lieutenant Wolfgang Lehminck Emden ordered
the shooting of Italian women and children of the town of Caiazzo during the German retreat in 1943. A resident of the town,
Giuseppe Agnone, emigrated to the US. There he researched the identity of Lehminck Emden, who enjoyed postwar success
as an architect and, later, a local councilor. In 1994, the ex-lieutenant was acquitted by a German court which mechanically
applied the law. The judges, though Wehrmacht courts never disciplined any officer for atrocities against civilians, airily declared
that because military courts could have disciplined the lieutenant, the statute of limitations precluded his being convicted for the
killings.

After a look at the successful parliamentary effort to extend and then eliminate the statute of limitations for Nazi murders, we
look at recent German trials which have employed the Nazi trials as precedent. On at least two occasions, German prosecutors
have used their experience trying war criminals in somewhat controversial trials against Serbian war crimes suspects.

Reunified Germany's recent prosecutions of East German defendants provide a context for West Germany's Nazi trial record.
Though some trials of ex- DDR officials may have been justified by the record of the East German regime, the post-unification
trial record appears unduly harsh in the context of the greater degree of evil occasioned by the Nazi regime, and the greater
degeree of leniency exhibited by West German courts in cases involving Nazi war criminals.

                     EX-NAZIS USE LIBEL LAW TO EVADE HISTORICAL GUILT

Erich Lüth, a humanitarian, the public affairs spokesman of Hamburg's postwar Social Democratic government, called for a
boycott of all films produced by ex- Nazi film producer Veit Harlan, the producer of "Jew Süss". Harlan and his distributors
sued to enjoin Lüth from advocating the boycott. The Hamburg court accepted their argument that Harlan's right to earn a living
was paramount to Lüth's right to freely express his opinion. On 16 January, 1958, the Constitutional Court reversed this verdict
in the landmark ruling which established the right to free speech in Germany.

In 1954, journalist and novelist Erich Kuby wrote a radio play about the futile Nazi defense of the Brittany port of Brest after
the allies had broken out of their Normandy beachheads. Kuby took part in the defense. The Nazi general in charge of that
defense, Bernhard Ramcke, sued Kuby and the producer of the play, Proske, for criminal libel. In an almost unprecedented act,
Hamburg prosecutors defended Kuby in the trial in 1959, and the court ruled in his favor.

Former Nazi military prosecutors were behind efforts to whitewash the deplorable record of Nazi military "justice", a system
which judicially murdered tens of thousands. The controversy was largely resolved in 1991 when the German Federal Social
Court accepted that Wehrmacht "justice" had not been justice at all. A former navy judge, Hans Filbinger, had to resign as
premier of Baden- Württemberg in 1978, when his wartime record as a navy judge ordering the execution of sailors, was
disclosed.

In conclusion, Germany had a mixed record of resolving the legacy of the Nazi regime. Some of the scandals, such as the
Heyde affair, were sordid and embarrassing. The failures resulted from officials refusing to outgrow the statist view traditional to
German administration. Because the Nazi regime had been the state, its actions had been legal on that basis, no matter how
criminal they appeared.

Even the unsuccessful efforts to resolve the Nazi legacy may have helped the process of democratization by providing a fuller
disclosure of the Nazi regime and a focus for opposition. Communist propaganda attacking West Germany as a mere
continuation of the Nazi regime was effective because it included some small grains of truth. It was not enough to reject those
accusations merely because they came from East Germany. Pro- Democrats must remain watchful. A resurgent nationalism
which wishes to forget about the crimes of the Nazi regime has some influence in today's reunified Berlin republic.