Higher Education

In Dortmund's nearly deserted court room last week, 20 onetime Nazi policemen, charged with atrocities, man slaughter and murder, stood before three black-robed West German judges and dispassionately told how, on wartime duty in Warsaw, they had indiscriminately shot and killed Jews in the city's ghetto. Admitting the killings, the defendants argued that they had merely followed orders. Their commanding officer (an SS captain who was later killed) had once told them, they testified, that to drive through the ghetto without killing at least one Jew was "a waste of gas." So, in one ghastly day, they had killed 110 men, women & children.

The judges and six jurors considered the evidence briefly and returned their verdict: not guilty. Presiding Judge Fritz Eickhoff explained that the officers actually responsible for the crime were long since dead and that the defendants them selves had acted under orders. "Because of their scant formal education," he concluded, "the defendants failed to realize that they committed a misdeed."

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