The Lammerding Affair

In 1944, as Germany's das Reich panzer division raced up from southwest France toward Normandy to meet the invading Allies, two episodes of unspeakable savagery occurred in its path.

In reprisal for an attack on a German garrison by the Resistance, Nazi troops marched scores of Frenchmen to the Place de Souillac in the southwestern town of Tulle. From every tree in and around the little square, from every balcony and lamppost hung a rope with a ready noose; next to each stood two ladders and two waiting SS men. As each victim mounted one ladder, one of the Germans climbed the other, placed a noose around the Frenchman's neck, and pulled it tight. Then the other SS man yanked away the victim's ladder. In all, 99 Frenchmen, aged 17 to 45, were hanged. Their bodies were buried in the town garbage dump.

The following day, in reprisal for the kidnaping of an SS officer by the French underground, a heavily armed contingent from the Reich division rounded up all the inhabitants of the peaceful village of Oradour-sur-Glane. Old people were routed from bed and children from the schoolhouse, where their teacher had just scrawled on the blackboard: "I make a resolution never to harm others." In the main square, German machine-gunners methodically mowed down 200 men, poured gunpowder onto the pile of bodies and set it afire; only five escaped.

In the church where the women and children had been herded, SS men ignited special suffocating grenades. Some of the trapped people died at once. Others were machine-gunned as they poured out of the building. Then the Germans set fire to the bodies of 241 women and 202 children; one woman survived. Oradour to this day remains an empty, desolate monument to the massacre.

Protected Criminals. The man who commanded the division, SS Brigade-fuehrer Heinrich (Heinz) Lammerding, became a successful building contractor in Duesseldorf after the war, even though a French military court in Bordeaux condemned him to death in absentia in J951 for the Tulle hangings. Lammerding is one of about 1,000 war criminals who were convicted in absentia by French courts after World War II but are still free in Germany.

Two legal documents protect them. West Germany's constitution prohibits the extradition of its own citizens. The 1954 accord between the Allies and Bonn prohibits the retrial in Germany of a war criminal if he has already been convicted in a French, British or U.S. court. That provision was designed to prevent lenient German judges from retrying war criminals after Allied courts had convicted them, and giving them lighter sentences. Ironically, the provision has served to protect those who were tried in absentia in Allied courts but then surfaced after 1955, when West Germany regained its sovereignty. As a result of the Lammerding affair and other war-criminal cases, however, France and West Germany are now on the verge of concluding a bilateral agreement that would allow the retrial of French cases in German courts.*

West Germany began looking into Lammerding's past in the early 1960s in connection with a number of atrocities perpetrated by his SS tank corps. Almost invariably, the investigators were told that the orders for the massacres came from officers other than Lammerding. Most of those officers, as it conveniently happens, died in Normandy or during the last days of Hitler's Reich.

Commando Raid. Once the special agreement between France and Germany is signed, the regional Central Office for the Prosecution of Nazi Mass Crimes will resume investigations. It could order Lammerding's arrest--if it feels it has sufficient evidence. Foreseeing that possibility, Lammerding recently turned his business affairs over to his son and moved to the West German village of Greiling, just across the border from Austria. If Germany does not arrest him, some Frenchmen have already threatened to settle the matter in their own way. Last month, when more than 5,000 mourners demonstrated in Tulle to demand punishment for Lammerding, many of them warned that they would organize a commando raid and kidnap him, as the Israelis had Adolf Eichmann.

*One who was not affected was Austrian-born Franz Stangl, the former commandant of Poland's Treblinka concentration camp. Found working in a Volkswagen factory in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1967, Stangl was extradited and two weeks ago was convicted by a West German court of sending at least 400,000 Jews to their deaths. Stangl, 62, will probably serve 20 years. If he is still alive after that, he will have to stand trial in Austria on charges of operating a Nazi euthanasia center, where 15,000 mentally and physically crippled people were put to death.

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