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Gestapo Crimes—And Punishment
Newsweek Febuary 25, 1980 Throughout the three and a half months of the trial, West German Judge Heinz Fassbender dispassionately read aloud from hundreds of documents detailing the transportation of some 73,000 French Jews to their deaths in Nazi concentration camps. Though spectators frequently wept, Fassbender showed no emotion, even when he read from a letter written by a child on his way to Auschwitz. But last week, when Fassbender found the three defendants guilty of complicity to murder, his voice was tinged with anger and emotion. "I can detach myself from the cases of sexual criminals," he said to the former Gestapo agents, "but not from you." With that, he ordered the three ex-Nazis to prison as what could be the last of the major war-crimes trials came to an end. •Legend': The defendants—Herbert Ha-gen, Kurt Lischka and Ernst Heinnch-sohn—had maintained that they knew nothing about the fate that awaited the Jews they sent to the death camps, but Fassbender called their contention "totally astonishing." As the trial in Cologne neared its end, Wolfgang Scheffler of the Free University of Berlin testified that the claim . that most Germans did not know what was happening to the Jews was a "legend" deliberately fostered in Germany after the war. "Every German was able to inform himself," Scheffler said. Spectators—many wearing yellow badges with the words "Juif de France" (Jew of France)—sat in silence as Fassbender sentenced the three men to prison terms ranging from six to twelve years. The prisoners will probably receive some medical dispensation after serving part of their sentences. Still, the verdict was a victory for the prosecution and for French Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld. For years, he had battled to bring the three to trial. After Fassbender passed judgment, Klarsfeld settled on a verdict of his own. Said he: "I am satisfied." |
