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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation
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slightly to: "A psychiatrist will be present during
your trial and will make a report on his observations of you."
A
reporter from the weekly Die Zeit, who was covering the hearing, drew
the following ironic conclusion from that exchange: "If you don't agree with
the president of a German tribunal, you must be crazy."
Neuberger, the
Minister of Justice for North Rhine Westphalia, was a Jew who had emigrated to
Israel after the war but had subsequently chosen to make his career in Germany.
Needless to say, Neuberger was the last person from whom I could expect
anything.
While I was in jail, a biology professor and former S.S.
officer, Bruno Berger, was tried in Frankfurt. He had selected eighty-six Jews
from Auschwitz in 1943, whose skeletons seemed interesting enough to be added
to the collection of Professor Hirt of the Reich University of Strasbourg. Then
he saw to it that those eighty six human beings, those eighty-six Jewish guinea
pigs, were sent to Natzweiler, where they were put to death and their flesh
boiled from their bones.
His sentence: three years.
My fellow
citizens in both the West and the East continue to think that if a man does
nothing reprehensible now, the faults of the past can be forgotten.
Meanwhile Serge had stirred up a lively campaign in my behalf. In spite
of definite objections to the illegal attempt at kidnapping on the part of some
members of the Resistance and Deportee associations, those organizations
appealed to the German Embassy in Paris. Their efforts, which I had
deliberately wanted to arouse, resulted in my being set free temporarily and
the warrant suspended. But in order to save face, the tribunal demanded bail of
30,000 marks. (Bail for S.S. Ludwig Hahn, chief of the Warsaw S.D.-Security
Police, had been set at 8,000 marks.)
When I was released, a guard
about fifty years old came up to me and shook my hand: "I was worried that you
would not be set free. You did well, very well indeed. I hope to see Lischka in
your cell someday."
Serge later told me what had happened: "The French
press reacted strongly to your imprisonment, and Jean Pierre Bloch summoned the
Resistance and Deportee association executives to his office on rue de
Choiseul. It was an extraordinary meeting, for both
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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
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