For the Last Time?

Aging (73) Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, financial wizard of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich, kept his perfect batting average when he was acquitted last week at Lueneburg's denazification court for the fourth (and probably last) time.

One of the three top Nazis* acquitted in the first war criminal trials at Number, Schacht had since been tried by three German courts.

The charges were pretty much the same: aiding in Hitler's rise to power, and preparing Germany's economy for war. His defense was pretty much the same: he had opposed Hitler's rearmament program after 1934, he had been sympathetic to the resistance movement after 1938. Said he at the fourth trial's end: "From judges with common sense you could not expect any other verdict."

* The others: Franz von Papen, Hans Fritzsche.

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