The Bureaucrat

Most Americans had all but forgotten Nuernberg, but its machinery of justice still ground on. The men now on trial were, in a sense, more important than the great and obvious evildoers sentenced earlier. They were men who had never, with their own hands, fired a shot or beaten a Jew. But they were as indispensable to the totalitarian state as the soldier, the policeman and the executioner. They were the plodding men with the filing-cabinet minds--the bureaucrats.

Their prototype was Hans Heinrich Lammers, an old man of whom few Germans and few Americans had ever heard; yet on every Third Reich decree his name had appeared, in a bold, inch-high sweep below the scrawl "Adolf Hitler." In his defense Lammers claimed that, as chief of the Reich Chancellery, he had merely acted as a sort of "notary public" or "glorified mailman." The prosecution thought otherwise. Next to Hitler, Lammers had been one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany.

Secret Pride. Lammers lacked the perverted brilliance of a Goebbels, the bravado of a Goring, the bold genius of a Speer. He was an unquestioning, ordinary bureaucrat, with the ordinary bureaucrat's training. After serving as an infantry captain in World War I (in which he lost an eye), he became a minor official in the German Ministry of the Interior. Disgusted by the weakness of the Weimar Republic, he joined the Nazis and betrayed government information to them. A specialist in constitutional law, Lammers was responsible for the legislative maze with which the Nazis surrounded their most lawless acts. He created the notorious "People's Courts," "simplified" the judicial system by drafting a decree empowering the Minister of Justice to "deviate from any existing law."

He cherished a secret pride in his ability to handle the Fuehrer. On his visits, he carried along maps and architectural plans in which Hitler found a childish delight. Nothing that happened in Germany was beyond or beneath Lammers' passion for detail. The prosecution last week produced a letter he had written in 1941 to Germany's Minister of Justice: "The enclosed newspaper clipping about the conviction of the Jew Marcus Luftgas to a prison sentence of two and one-half years [for the hoarding of eggs] has been submitted to the Fuehrer. The Fuehrer wishes that Luftgas be sentenced to death. May I ask you urgently to instigate the necessary steps. . . ."

"Nastiest Ole Man." Last week, hunched in the prisoners' dock, earphones clamped to his seemingly petrified bald head, his body weirdly stiffened (he suffers from arthritis of the spine and hardening of the arteries), he was still a perfect bureaucrat. His only concern was an efficient defense. He worked furiously, scribbling endless notes of rebuttal.

Said his American Negro jailer: "He is the nastiest ole man I ever did see. He growls like a dog when I come near him." But he was also a pathetic old man, whose wife and daughter had committed suicide, and who would probably not live to the end of his sentence. The lesson that Lammers held for the world was that there were other men like him and not only in Germany, whose mediocre but precise minds were willing to do the office work of terror.

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