Poor Misguided People

WAR CRIMES

In a dark forest of pines 18 miles outside Berlin stands the concentration camp known as Sachsenhausen. For ten Nazi years its concrete walls, topped by electrified barbed wire and watchtowers snouted with machine guns, had shut in a total of 200,000 prisoners, of whom half died.

Last week, in the first exhibition war crimes trial staged by the Russians in Germany, 16 of Sachsenhausen's top jailers were called to book for their crimes. In a courtroom in Berlin's Soviet sector, they were confronted by a file of witnesses, some weeping, some scowling with hatred, some icily vengeful. But in this trial, the Communist desire to win friends and influence Germans diluted the passion for swift justice that had led the Russians at Nuernberg to demand death penalties for all the accused.

Cold Pistol Barrel. The Sachsenhausen prisoners, ranged in two rows in a playpen-like dock, made no attempt to deny their crimes. Some of them, doubtless under Russian influence, talked like the accused in 1937 purge trials. "I got into this net of criminality," said dark, intense August Hoehn, the camp second-in-command. (In one day, Hoehn had hanged, gassed and shot 510 prisoners in petulance over a superior's rebuke.) "I got so tangled in its strands, I couldn't go back. At the mere thought I could feel the cold barrel of a pistol on my neck."

One by one the others took the stand; they said much the same thing. There was practical, slight Ernst Brennscheidt, a civilian government employee who might have been working in Berlin today if he had not been sent to Sachsenhausen to test army shoes. His methods were simple. For 14 hours a day, beating them when they dropped, he had marched prison inmates carrying 50-lb. sandbags around & around a half-mile track until the shoes wore out. Then he knew which shoes were faulty.

"I accuse the Hitler system," cried Sachsenhausen's Dr. Heinz Baumkoetter. (He used to pour burning phosphorus on his patients, so that afterwards he could test the efficacy of burn salves.) "I accuse the system which made me--a harmless man by nature--into a criminal against humanity." Only dandified, cadaverous Willy Shubert, who had once earned a medal and a holiday in Italy for helping to kill 18,000 Russians in three months, refused to grovel. "I killed men on orders," he boasted, "and I killed men without orders." Sachsenhausen's commander in chief, pig-eyed, bulletheaded Anton Kaindl, more than made up for Willy's outburst. "I confess my heavy guilt," he told his judges, "and my sincere thanks go to the Soviet authorities for the procedure of this trial."

The Culprit. It was "monopoly capitalism," explained Defense Attorney Kasnatschejev, that was the real culprit. The prisoners were instruments of forces beyond their control.

In his summation, the Russian prosecutor reminded the court that the death penalty had been abolished in the Soviet Union (TIME, June 2). Next day the court passed sentence: life imprisonment for 14 of the murderers, 15 years' hard labor for the other two. An old Communist in the audience, who had not forgotten his year at Sachsenhausen, hissed: "They're making these swine out to be poor misguided people. I hope they send them all to the lead mines in Siberia."

So far as is known, the Russians have not abolished the Siberian lead mines.

*Seated: Anton Kaindl (glasses). Standing in dock: August Hoehn.

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