Old Debts

In three European capitals last week, the old but ever horrifying story of Nazi cruelties unfolded again.

P: In Warsaw, Erich Koch, former Gauleiter of East Prussia and Hitler's Reichskommissar in occupied Ukraine, stood accused of responsibility or complicity in the gas-chamber and concentration-camp deaths of 4,000,000 Russians, 160,000 Jews and 72,000 Poles. After nearly a decade in prison and four months on trial, frail emaciated Erich Koch, now 62, was still defiant. Coughing into a handkerchief, sipping tea and porridge to rally his strength, Koch made long, fiery speeches in Polish in his own defense, disputing the court's right to try him, insisting that Polish Communists were guilty of crimes worse than those he was charged with. Between speeches he listened glumly to wartime recordings of his once-vibrant voice proclaiming, "Without Hitler we are nothing. With Hitler we shall be all!" Husky guards dragged the ex-Gauleiter to his feet to hear two verdicts: for a Polish Jew named Hersz Pianko, whose entire family of 63 persons was wiped out under Koch's rule, the judge ordered payment of one poignantly symbolic zloty (4-c-); for Koch, the verdict was death.

P: In Vienna, one of Koch's most efficient killers, a 52-year-old former SS master sergeant named Josef Gabriel, faced justice for wholesale murder in Galicia. Early this month, to escape trial, Gabriel had hurled himself from a third-floor courthouse landing, but he survived to hear witnesses describe how he held Jewish children under his arm while blowing their brains out with a pistol. Likely sentence: life imprisonment.

P:In Athens, Max Merten, once director of the Wehrmacht's administration and finance section and therefore the man who signed army orders concerning the disposal of 56,000 Jews from Salonica, drew a 25-year sentence.

Why were such trials still going on at this late date? In Koch's case, his own illness and the search for evidence had postponed the trial for eight years. Merten had returned to Greece in April 1957 as the prosperous representative of German travel agencies, and to his astonishment had been arrested.

Poland and Greece have announced that now their dockets are clear. Wrote the Frankfurter Rundschau: "For many Germans the Hitler era is a forgotten nightmare, buried in a nebulous past. But outside Germany the memories are still alive whether we like it or not."

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