At least 3,000 of the 10,800 judges in West Germany and Berlin have Nazi records and they will all be immune from prosecution on May 8 under a statute of limitations, two leaders of democratic youth organizations charged here today.
They are Reinholdt Strecker, 29, chairman of the judicial investigation committee of the Socialist Students Association of the Federal Republic, and Wolfgang F. Hoag, 24, a member of the West Berlin executive committee of the League for Human Rights. Both are students at the Free University here.
They insisted that not enough was being done to cleanse what Hoag called the “judicial stables” and that most of the projected actions would be too late in the face of the May 8 deadline. Under a West German law, criminal proceedings cannot be started after 15 years from the official date of the collapse of the Nazi regime which has been fixed at May 8, 1945.
Strecker, who has spent two years studying the records of about 10,000 Nazi judges, said he found that at least 3,000 were now serving as judges who had “distorted the law’ during the Nazi period “by sentencing people to execution for crimes that were not deserving of capital punishment.”
He said that his investigation had shown that a judge under the Nazi regime could take lenient action even against a convicted criminal if he had wished to do so but that many of the 3,000 currently-sitting judges had sentenced people to death on the flimsiest excuses.
Federal Attorney General A. Guede had examined the photostatic copies of the records of 41 judges accused as former Nazis and had found the cases were authentic. The Attorney General, Strecker said, had filed formal charges against the 41, demanding their removal from the bench and punishment as ex-Nazis.
Mayor Willy Brandt declined to accept the figure of 3,000 judges and expressed disapproval of the “over-dramatized” manner in which he said the two youth leaders were handling the question. He said that “responsible officials” in both West Berlin and West Germany “are certainly looking into the problem and doing what they can. ” He revealed that in West Berlin alone eight such judges had been quietly forced off the bench. He said he favored this procedure rather than one which would make “out of Germany a divided camp where one man brands another.”
(From Bonn it was reported today that two West German states–Bavaria and Baden-Wurttemberg–have accepted documentation from East German sources on the Judicial records under the Nazi regime of Judges now on the bench in West Germany. The two states, and several others, are conducting inquiries into such charges against Judges in their states, the report emphasized.)
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
