The Last Trial?

Old crimes, old criminals

The spectators' gallery of a Duesseldorf courtroom erupted with shouts of "Scandal!" and "An offense against the victims!" as the sentences were read out last week to the defendants, seven men and two women, all age 60 or older. One got a life sentence; another was acquitted; the rest received jail terms ranging from three to twelve years. Thus ended the longest (5 1/2 years), and probably the last, major West German trial for Nazi war crimes against concentration camp inmates. The nine were all guards at the Maidanek concentration camp in Poland between 1941 and 1944. They had been charged with shooting, gassing, drowning or fatally beating some of the 250,000 Polish Jews, gypsies, Russian P.O.W.s and others who died there.

Best known of the defendants--and the only one to receive a life sentence was Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan, 61, who was reportedly known at Maidanek as "the Mare," because of her predilection for kicking victims with her shiny jackboots. She was accused of murdering nearly 1,200 prisoners, mostly women and children, and of complicity in the deaths of 725 more. An Austrian, Hermine met Russell Ryan, then a U.S. Air Force mechanic, in Europe, married him in Canada in 1958 and later moved with him to the U.S., where she became a citizen and a resident of Queens, N.Y. She was discovered in Canada in 1964 by Simon Wiesenthal, a tireless tracker of Nazi fugitives. In 1971 she was stripped of U.S. citizenship on grounds of concealing her war crimes. In 1973 she was deported.

The relatively lenient sentences, handed down by a five-judge panel, drew harsh reactions beyond the courtroom, since they fell far short of what prosecutors had asked for: life imprisonment for four of the defendants and jail terms of between five and ten years for three others. Heinz Galinski, a Jewish spokesman in West Berlin, described the sentences as "an insult to all victims of the National Socialist regime." Even West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt told a group of Israelis who had formerly lived in West Germany that he found himself in "complete understanding" with the victims' relatives.

But the sentences reflected the difficulties of establishing clear guilt for Hermine Ryan crimes, however horrible, committed 40 years ago. Under West German law, a defendant has to be linked by the testimony of witnesses to a specific murder in order to receive the maximum penalty of life imprisonment. Since the war, much evidence has vanished and the memories of former camp inmates have faded.

Of 16 defendants who went on trial in 1975, one died, one was declared medically unfit and four were acquitted for lack of evidence; one was tried separately for lesser crimes and got two years. Among the surviving defendants, nearly all admitted sharing the responsibility for the brutality of the camp but stopped short of admitting to any murders. Hermine Ryan told the court she now had "deep understanding and regret" for the sufferings of the prisoners. "I only reject the charge of murder," she added. In the end, the testimony was strong enough to exact the maximum penalty only for Ryan --and for just two murders.

West Germany has sought to atone for its Nazi past by bringing its war criminals to trial. A 1979 law indefinitely extended the statute of limitations for murder so that Nazi criminals could be pursued. But given the protracted length of such proceedings, the cost and the limited results, it is unlikely that any more such mass trials will take place.

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