See Possibility of Legal Precedent in Freeing of Former Nazi Judge

A West Berlin court established what may become a legal precedent in the trial of former Nazi Judges who sentenced political offenders to death during World War II when it acquitted 66-year-old Hans Joachim Rehse of charges of murder and attempted murder Friday. Judge Rehse, who presided over one of the notorious Peoples Courts in 1943 and 1944, was freed by Judge Ernst Jurgen Oske on grounds that the prosecution had failed to prove that the defendant deliberately “bent” the law in his wartime judgments. The prosecution announced that it would seek to have the acquittal revised.

The prosecution, which demanded a life sentence – the most severe punishment under West German law – charged that Judge Rehse had signed the death sentences of 250 political prisoners. The case against him was based on seven of those sentences which he signed against persons, all Germans, who allegedly made remarks against the Nazi regime or had cracked jokes about Hitler and other Nazi leaders. Two of them were Roman Catholic priests and one was a demented 16-year-old youth. The cases were regarded as the most arbitrary and most offensive of Judge Rehse’s “crimes in office.” Rehse was sentenced to a five year term last summer but it was reversed on technical grounds and a new trial led to Friday’s acquittal.

Judge Oske said in his acquittal judgment that while the verdicts of the Peoples Courts are inhuman by today’s standards, they were rendered 25 years ago at a time of crisis when everything depended on maintaining national security. He based his ruling on an earlier decision by West Germany’s Federal Court declaring that judges could not be convicted of having deliberately manipulated the law “if they were blinded by the Nazi ideology and legal philosophy of that time.” Judge Rehse testified that as a judge he was “bound to the law of Hitler and was convinced of the justification of that law.” He said that the situation in Germany during the fourth and fifth years of World War II called for “severe action” and that he was only executing “the letter of the law.”