The Criminals

In Europe last week it was the night before the Day of Judgment. The reckoning followed implacably in the footsteps of the liberating armies. And those who had once been powerful, ruled states and sent armies and individuals to their death, were themselves skulking in terror of those whom they had once terrorized.

Through Istanbul's blacked-out station two plain clothesmen marched a big-nosed, big-mustached man. They put him forcibly aboard the Sofia express. He was Peter Grabowsky, Minister of the Interior and Bulgaria's No. 1 Jew baiter in Premier Filov's cabinet. Ten days before, he had arrived in Turkey with forged identification papers. U.S. Ambassador Laurence Steinhardt urged the Turks to send him back where death or jail await him.

Dmitri Christov, Grabowsky's successor as Minister of the Interior, did not even get into Turkey. When the Turks refused to let him cross the frontier, Ex-minister Christov killed himself.

Fortnight ago General Charles de Gaulle's government ordered Marshal Petain (who is now in Germany) arrested in absentia. French prisons bulged with Vichy big & little officials awaiting trials.

In London, after eleven months of solemn deliberation, the United Nations War Crimes Commission announced a list of 350 Nazis who had committed crimes abroad. Unlisted were Hitler, Himmler, Goering and Goebbels.

Meanwhile the Russian government was reported to be hunting three Finnish war criminals: ex-Premier Risto Ryti, ex-Premier Edwin Linkomies, ex-Finance Minister Vaeinoe Tanner. The staid New York Times reflected a change in the political climate and habits of a decade by reporting not that the fugitive Finns had gone into hiding, but that they "had gone underground."*

Rumania's General Ion Antonescu & friends, and Germany's economic expert Karl Clodius, had already disappeared into Russian jails. Glad to be rid of the embarrassment, his country had now gleefully handed over the former Rumanian dictator, who would presumably be held for a great trial of war criminals.

But political criminality is in part an accident of place. The Germans were also gloating over two "criminals" last week. They were Giuseppe Togliatti, brother of Italy's No. 1 Communist, Palmiro Togliatti, and Mario Badoglio, son of Marshal Badoglio. The Germans threatened to kill them (and 38 others) in reprisal for the execution of Pietro Caruso, Rome's Fascist police chief (see below).

*Ten years ago the word underground, if it meant anything to Americans, meant the London subway. Now every child knows the meaning of the term which was first coined by the 19th-Century Russian revolutionists (podpolye, under the field), then seeped into German (unterirdisch), worked its way slowly westward.

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