Acquittal of the "Blood Judge"

As a judge on Hitler's dreaded wartime People's Court, Hans-Joachim Rehse signed 231 death sentences. Last year a West German lower court sentenced Rehse, now 66, to five years in prison as an accessory to "legal murder." Plainly convinced that the sentence was far too light, the Federal Court in Karlsruhe ordered a retrial on the grounds that he was either wholly responsible or wholly innocent and should be sentenced accordingly. Last week a Berlin criminal court touched off a nationwide uproar by acquitting Rehse.

Catcalls and outraged shouts of "Pfui, Pfui!" interrupted Judge Ernst-Juergen Oske's reading of the verdict. A man in the audience rose and cried: "Millions were murdered--and now a sentence like this!" As Rehse, his greying head raised high, tried to walk from the room, an elderly man slapped his face and cried: "Shame, you blood judge, for all the victims you have on your conscience!" Berlin Mayor Klaus Schuetz called the decision "outrageous." Robert Kempner, a former U.S. deputy chief of counsel at the Nuernberg Trials, who now lives in Frankfurt, described the ruling as "the greatest setback of German justice since 1945." For once, the New Left and the right-wing press of Axel Springer found themselves in agreement. Both condemned the judgment as outrageously lenient.

Death to All. Under Rehse's cold eye, leniency was rarely a problem. He sat in judgment of a schizophrenic boy who wrote from a juvenile asylum requesting "weapons, munitions, cameras, explosives and a diamond ring" to overthrow the Nazi regime; of a Catholic priest who dispatched an appeal for a "humane peace" to a Swedish bishop; of an internationally famous biologist who told a friend that he expected the Third Reich to crumble. All were condemned to death. To be sure, Rehse served only as a member on the bench of one of Hitler's most notorious political judges, "Raving Roland" Freisler, who escaped the Allies' justice by dying in an air raid at the war's end. But the Federal Court noted last year that German judges always act collectively.

Judge Oske's reasoning took another tack. It is one that could, if it is accepted as a precedent, free 45 remaining former Nazi judges and prosecutors from prosecution. Oske insisted that Rehse and his seven fellow judges on Freisler's dreaded Volksgerichtshof did not deliberately subvert the law as then applicable. Thus, while the sentences in which Rehse participated were "inhuman as seen today, in times of war no nation and no state can get along with normal means of defense. Germany was in a life-and-death struggle."

At 42, Oske hardly qualifies as a remnant of the Nazi judiciary that survived the war. His legal education came after the war, and he has established a reputation as a competent, calm and fair judge. Overwhelmed by the reaction to his decision, he suffered a nervous breakdown a few days later. Meanwhile, as 7,000 left-wing students demonstrated against the verdict on Berlin's Kurfuerstendamm, Chief Federal Prosecutor Ludwig Martin let it be known that he would handle the appeal against the acquittal.

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