Mr. Misfortune

In the summer of 1944, things began to pile up on Private Karl Schleicher of Adolf Hitler's Wehrmacht. German army medicine was ready and able to treat his wounded thigh after a Russian bullet had creased it, but the German supply system was not up to replacing his torn pants. Private Schleicher, turned down by his sergeant, pinched a pair for himself from the quartermaster's store, and went into battle again. In the midst of the fray he lost his unit, got back to it a week later, just in time to be arrested for pants-stealing. To make a good trial, a new charge was added: desertion. Private Schleicher, duly court-martialed, was resigned to getting five years in prison, when the Russians stepped in, shipped him off to Siberia.

Cold and hungry on a diet of cabbage and barley, Schleicher fended for himself once again, and was caught stealing a handful of potatoes. The Russians convicted the P.W. and gave him 25 years at hard labor. Schleicher went to work driving rivets. He spoiled a rivet and a guard hit him with a chain. It broke Schleicher's nose, jaw and-ankle. The Russians sent him to a hospital, and when his ankle refused to mend, they shipped him home. Schleicher got back to Germany in 1948 to find that his wife had remarried and that he was officially dead. He retired to another hospital to have his leg amputated.

Resigned to misery, he came out 18 months later, determined to give his wife a divorce. But first, said the lawyers, he must be officially brought to life again. They dug up old records. They pored over the past. What was this? An unserved sentence for pants-stealing? A Hamburg court investigated, and sentenced Schleicher to five months' imprisonment for his forgotten crime. Schleicher appealed. A higher court cut the sentence to one month. Schleicher threw himself into a Hamburg pond, determined to end it all. Even at this he failed. A passing couple saw him and dragged him out of the water.

Last week the Hamburg city council took pity on Private Schleicher, and passed a special legislative act granting him full pardon for everything. But bitterness had entered the sack's sad soul. "I'm going to spend my life," he swore, "fighting the stupid red tape which is entangling every German."

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