N WEST PROTECTS WAR CRIMINALS

Five former members of the Nazi police and security services have just been sentenced for mass murder in Frankfurt, West Germany—11 years after they were first arrested and charged.

But as they are appealing against the paltry sentences awarded against them by the court, the men have been allowed to remain at liberty on bail.

The men involved are Adolf Petsch (67), a former member of the Nazi security service (SD). He was given 15 years for his part in mowing down more than 12,000 Jews with a machine-gun in front of a mass grave at Pinsk, in western The other four-all former police officials—were found to have taken part in the eviction of ten ghettos in the Pinsk area in the autumn of 1942, ordered by Nazi secret police chief Heinrich Himmler.

The court was told the police battalion in which they were their Shettos before ordering company leaders had sealed off their inhabitants to mass graves, where they were shot.

They were Johann Kuhr (56), sentenced to two and a hall years; Heinrich Plantius (57), four years; Rudolf Eckert (58), three years; and Heinrich Teltz (56), three and a half years.

All four served for many years after the war in the West briefly detained They 62 for German police. They were investigation and then released on bail. They have been on bail ever since.

Kuhr and Plantius were also accused of taking part in the shooting of 6,000 political ommissars of the Red Arm at Bialapodlaskas, but the court found the charge had not been proved!

The maximum sentence for these crimes under West German law is life imprisonment. The same court also sentenced a former German commandant of a Polish railway station, Walter Gross (61) to four years' jail for shooting and killing a young Jewish girl who had been pushed out of a carriage by non-Tewish passengers. He told the court he had carried out an order that all Jews found outside the ghettos were to be shot immediately.

All six were released on bail after defence lawyers announced they would appeal on the grounds that the accused were acting under orders.

The lawyers had succeeded in spinning the trial over 14 months, during which evidence had been taken from witnesses in Israel, Austria, the United States and the Soviet Union.

The delays engineered by the Frankfurt defendants are the rule rather than the exception when Nazis come before the West German courts. One anti-fascist lawyer, in recent letter to 'Der Spiegel', suggested sarcastically that free sanatorium be established to treat the illnesses cited by Nazi defendants to delay their trials.

The letter was from Dr Robert Kempner, of Pennsylvania, who was an official in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior before Hitler came to power and later prosecuted the Jazi leaders at Nuremberg Four particularly glaring cases have recently been cited by the International Committee of the Survivors of AuschInmates of the Nordhausen concentration camp who had been forced to witz, which was meeting for the first time on German soil. The names of these Nazis were ignored by the German Press.

The four men named by the committee are: • Horst Wagner, liaison man between Adolf Eichmann and the Nazi Foreign Ministry, who later served under Henrich Himmler himself.

For the last 15 years Wagner has stood under a charge of complicity in the murder of at least 356,664 Jews from Hungary, Slovakia, Greece, Italy, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark.

His victims were deported to the extermination camps after April 1943 when the Nazi 'final solution' was in full swing. Less than two weeks before Wagner was due to appear for trial in Essen, his lawyer withdrew, bringing the first postponement.

His new lawyer succeeded in winning a whole number of further postponements to allow Wagner to undergo medical examination. He was examined in succession by a general practitioner, an eye specialist, an orthopaedic surgeon and finally a psychiatrist.

In this way he managed to keep out of the court until June 1971. On May 26, 1972, three days before the court finally intended to begin the trial, Wagner had an eye operation performed, which forced another postponement.

In July last year, after stalling successfully for 14 years, Wagner won another postponement because of an orthopaedic disorder of the hip. He was admitted to a clinic on August 24 last year and his doctors plan to operate this year-but not just yet.

Visitors to Erkrath, near Dusseldorf, can find the old butcher walking the streets a free man. • Horst Schumann, a doctor of medicine, was responsible for macabre operations on human guinea-pigs at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, two of the most notorious Nazi deathcamps. He was seeking a way of preventing "subhumans' from reproducing, while at the same time being able to force the last ounce of labour power out of their bodies.

Schumann used radiation to sterilize his victims and then removed their reproductive organs surgically for examination. He belonged to the Luftwafte, not the SS, which means he cannot claim he was acting under orders-the usual excuse put forward by these war criminals.

Schumann enjoyed the personal protection of Ghana's 'redeemer' Kwame Nkrumah until the latter's death in 1966, when West Germany succeeded in extraditing the German criminal.

Investigation has shown Schumann is adroit at manipulating his blood pressure with strong coffee just prior to court examinations of his state of health. His first trial, in 1970, ended before a verdict due to ill-health established by a court examiner.

At this trial Schumann was not accused in connection with his infamous 'experiments', but only for other crimes under the Nazis' 'euthanasia' programme. After four years' prevarication the court claimed there was no time to prepare a case based on Schumann's work underground in a munitions plant. experiments.

Schumann lives freely in Seckbach, outside Frankfurt, and has yet to come to trial again. It is worth noting that the survivors of Schumann's 'experiments' and similar 'medical' enterprises of the Nazi regime also had a long wait. It was not until late last year that the West German government agreed to pay them compensation.

It finally earmarked just over flm to pay compensation —at least 1,357 of the survivors had previously been forced to rely on charity from the International Red Cross. • Johannes Thuemmler, former Gestapo chief of Katowice, Poland. He headed courtsmartial in which he passed sentence, as documents prove, after 30-seconds to twominutes proceedings.

Thuemmler had only one verdict and only two sentences. They condemned 60 per cent of the defendants to death and all the rest to Auschwitz. He admits to having been in charge of about 200 such 'trials. But documents indicate that personally he passed at least 658 death sentences.

On June 10, 1970, a court in Ellwangen declined to bring Thuemmler to trial and appeal from the prosecution was later rejected by a higher court in Stuttgart.

In July 1972 Thuemmler was exposed in • a television documentary programme broadcast from Baden-Baden. The programme showed Polish documents and interviewed witnesses who massively incriminated the former Gestapo chief. 20,000 died here.

The programme's editor handed his material and documents to the Stuttgart prosecutor's office, but it appears nothing has been done with it. Thuemmler receives a substantial pension from the Carl Ziess foundation, where he was employed for years in an important post, enabling him to live in some style at Aalen in Württemberg. • Albert Ganzenmueller was a state secretary in the Nazi Transport Ministry when Himmler appealed for more trains to deport Jews and carry out the 'final solution'.

Ganzenmueller responded with brisk efficiency, brushing aside red tape to speed Himmler's victims to their deaths. No such efficiency has been displayed by those charged with preparing Ganzenmueller's trial.

He selected a lawyer who was already immersed in a complicated war crimes case and has succeeded in postponing trial for over 15 years on the grounds that his lawyer needs adequate time to familiarize himself with the case.

Ganzenmueller lives today, a free man, in the little Allgau town of Oberjoch, near Hindelang. Like Thuemmler he is now nearly 70 and has at the present rate an excellent chance of living out the rest of his days without ever seeing the inside of a prison.

These cases are not by any means unique. There are dozens of other notorious Nazi criminals in West Germany living as respected, often wealthy, middle-class citizens and protected by the state apparatus riddled by the Nazi old boy network.

Press, Monday On January 1 this year February F. Hetherington, former chairman of the 1 East Midlands Gas Board, whose salary is well in excess of £23 a week. He gets about £17,000 a That's about €350 a week.

The real political teeth lies in his part-time members who get a couple of thousand plus capenses making appear-