War Crimes Unforgotten

From standard Communist propaganda, or the much-praised movie 'Judgment at Nuremberg, one might conclude that West Germans have spent the past decade merely brushing Nazi crimes under the carpet. Not so. Obviously many Nazis have escaped justice, but since 1945 some 13,000 of Hitler's henchmen have gone on trial in West Germany, and about 5,000 have been sentenced to jail (there is no death penalty in West Germany). Today, some 40 separate trials are under way, with 90 defendants, including prison-camp commandants, guards, gas-chamber operators and plain Nazi bureaucrats, who for years hid in village or city obscurity.

Old Documents. Ferreting out these criminals is the fulltime task of the Central Office for Nazi Crimes, a Wrest German government investigation agency organized in 1958 to coordinate the faltering prosecution efforts of the separate West German Laender (states). Operating in Ludwigsburg near Stuttgart, the Central Office includes a judge or prosecuting attorney from each of the ten Laender as well as West Berlin, plus a staff of 25 specialists who search out and study cache after cache of Hitler's wartime records. Their goal is always the same: new names and new evidence. The Central Office's director is Erwin Schuele, 49, a veteran of the Wehrmacht campaign in Russia, who spent two months in 1960 sifting the huge mounds of Nazi documents in the U.S. archives warehouse in Alexandria, Va. His work helped build up a list of thousands of Germans involved in one way or another with Nazi mass murders.

Schuele's office does no prosecuting itself, simply passes its findings on to justice authorities in each Land. Because the research and indexing tasks are immense, many of the prosecutions are a decade or more late, but, says Schuele hopefully, "one thing leads to another." Thus, when Central Office agents were interrogating a onetime SS leader, the name "Heuser" kept cropping up in connection with terror against Jews near the Russian city of Minsk. But "Heuser" meant nothing until the Central Office cross index turned up the grisly testimony of a witness at the Nurnberg trials who recalled that one "Obersturmjuehrer Georg Heuser" had poured gasoline over a dozen Jewish prisoners and burned them alive at Minsk during the war. A series of leads sent investigators to Koblenz, where they found Heuser, now boss of the criminal police for the state of Rhineland-Palatinate. He had risen with the aid of forged documents.

New Names. Last week Heuser and 13 fellow Nazis were on trial in Koblenz for the slaying of 70,000 gypsies, Jews and Russian peasants; Heuser alone is charged with the murder, by shooting, gassing, burning or live burial, of 30,356 people in the Minsk region between 1941 and 1944. On the witness stand, Heuser's voice was shaky as he recalled one of the massacres. "It was like automation. Somebody shouted: 'There's one still alive!' I shot. And then I continued to shoot."

Another defendant. Artur Harder, a clerk in the Krupp truck factory in Frankfurt, was accused of having helped Heuser tie victims to a stake, "pour fuel on and light the living sacrifices." Harder said that he was kept so busy cremating bodies in a special incinerator he had devised that he had been able to take off only two days for his honeymoon. Following Harder's testimony, the judges cleared the court of school-age children, apparently on the theory that they were getting too vivid a picture of Nazi horror.

While the trial proceeds, Schuele and his staff are already busy investigating a whole new batch of suspects. They are hurrying because by May 1965, a statute of limitations on murder could put hundreds of World War II killers beyond the reach of the jailer.

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