Legalities

Yesterday evening, a quick read of 'The Collini Case' by Ferdinand von Shirach, an international bestseller from Penguin and a courtroom drama from Germany. It is not a coincidence that the book is about old Nazis and the author is called von Shirach, the name of one of the first round war criminals at Nuremberg, as the first round war criminal was the grandfather of the author. You can read all about it at the Guardian web site.

A easy read, although the pivot of the story - the discovery of the past of the victim of the murder half way through the trial, months after the murder - seemed improbable. The connection would, one would have thought, have been made rather quicker, despite the taciturnity of the murderer.

But the story contains interesting material on the laws around reprisals for resistance attacks and war crimes more generally.

First, it seems that such reprisals, provided that they are proportionate and decent, are not war crimes. Which does not seem unreasonable to me. As it happens, on the way to the Wigmore Hall earlier in the week, we had seen posters advertising a book or something about resistance to the Germans after an (imagined) English surrender in 1940, posters which made me wonder about the propriety of blowing up the canteens (say) of the army to which one's properly constituted and empowered government had surrendered. Surrender means that you have given up, that you are no longer resisting, and to go on resisting is breaking the rules: the line between resistance and terrorism is a thin one.

Then there is a law which says that all crimes, other than murder, lapse after a certain period.

Then there is a law which says that once a crime has lapsed it cannot be revived. A version, perhaps, of the near universal rule against double jeopardy.

Then there is a law which says that one's crime is mitigated if one was acting under orders. Mitigation which applies to the vast majority of German war criminals from the second world war.

Then there is a law which says that when several people commit a crime, all are individually guilty, just as if they had acted alone. On the other hand if one was just accessory, the crime is mitigated as above.

Into all this, in the late sixties, one Dr. Eduard Dreher, a lawyer who had done bad but possibly not criminal things during the war and who went on to a successful career after the war, stirred an innocuous seeming tweak, an innocuous tweak which by making them accessories to murders rather than murderers, amnestied virtually all the then remaining war criminals.

All of which reminds one that it is not surprising that the German student generation of the sixties of the last century had problems with the past, with the role of their own parents in that past and with the role of those parents in covering up that past.