Post-war Trial Research Articles

Evading Libitina

Abstract Under the sign of Libitina, the Roman goddess of burials and funerals invoked in Horace's Ode 3.30, this essay provides a celebratory introduction to the work of the Polish Jewish poet Zuzanna Ginczanka (1917–44), situating her within the cultural history of commemoration and consecration of the dead in Poland and the painful confrontation with the unburied dead of the Holocaust, of whom Ginczanka is one. Her best-known poem, a bitter parody of Juliusz Słowacki's “My Testament,” turns the Horatian notion of poetry as the most precious and enduring legacy on its head by construing the author's meager household possessions, looted after her denunciation to the Nazis in wartime, as the only offering her fellow citizens will cherish, while the text itself was actually brought as evidence in a postwar trial of the Polish woman she accuses in the poem and contributed to a conviction for collaboration. Using historian Thomas Laqueur's terms necro-sociability and necronominalism as competing impulses in a seemingly intractable struggle, this essay argues that it is possible to find in Ginczanka's joyful defiance of traditional accounts of body and spirit the point of departure for a poetics that claims a new freedom of imagination in the attempt to transcend the most stubborn of memory wars.

Opinia profesora Władysława Woltera w sprawie działalności sądów niemieckich na obszarach polskich w okresie najazdu hitlerowskiego

Opinion of Professor Władysław Wolter on the Activities of German Courts in Polish Territories during the Nazi Occupation The study was devoted to the legal opinion drawn up in the post-war trial against the German judge Albert Michel on the activities of German courts in Polish territories during the Nazi occupation. The scope of the opinion is broader than it appears from the title – Professor Władysław Wolter covered the entire German occupation including the actual German invasion in 1939. The text of the source was preceded by a discussion in which the circumstances of the opinion were explained, the author’s profile was presented, and its most important theses were characterised. The statements of the opinion were re­lated to other views of the doctrine and jurisprudence, as well as the decisions issued in the Michel case.

Revealing unique inscriptions of a Nazi collaborator in Doodencel 601 of the Oranjehotel

During the Second World War the German occupants of the Netherlands made ample use of the Scheveningen prison near The Hague, popularly nicknamed the Oranjehotel. One former death cell in this infamous prison (Doodencel 601) has been preserved in its original condition, showing wartime inscriptions on the cell walls. Interestingly, a small section of the wall has been given an additional plaster layer, presumably covering inscriptions. Here, we report on the visualization of this enigmatic text, which so far had escaped the reach of historians. Our visualization methodology was threefold. First, we determined the cell-wall stratigraphy and its composition based on a sample cross-section. Second, we prepared a physical model wall, mimicking the layering of the original cell wall. Third, we tested a combination of raking light photography and infrared thermography on the model wall. Applying this methodology on the original wall revealed the inscriptions, including the author’s name Daniël de Blocq van Scheltinga, a prominent Nazi collaborator, as well as a calendar and an important date of his post-war trial in the fall of 1945. Our visualizations flawlessly dovetail with archival findings. Together, they offer an intimate view of an early post-war inmate of the Scheveningen prison, whose message was covered up once the cell was transformed into a war monument in 1946.

Evidential remains

This article utilises the theoretical perspectives of the forensic turn to further expand our historical understandings and interpretations of the events of the Holocaust. More specifically, it applies a theory of the materialities of dead bodies to historically reconstruct and reinterpret the death march from Buchenwald to Dachau from 7 to 28 April 1945. It focuses on dead bodies as ‘evidence’, but explores how the evidential meanings of corpses along the death-march route evolved and changed during the march itself and in the aftermath of discovery by approaching American military forces. While drawing on theories of the evidential use of dead bodies, it remains firmly grounded in empirical historical research based on archival sources. The archives at the Buchenwald Concentration Camp contain eyewitness accounts and post-war trial testimony that enable a deeply contextualised ‘microhistory’ of the geography, movements, perpetrators, victims and events along this specific death march in April and May 1945. This ‘thick description’ provides the necessary context for a theoretical reading of the changing evidential meanings of dead bodies as the death march wove its way from Buchenwald to Dachau and the war and the Holocaust drew to an end.

Genocide for “Sanitary Purposes”? The Bogdanovka Murder in Light of Postwar Trial Documents

ABSTRACTDrawing on Soviet and Romanian postwar trial material, this study offers a renewed exploration of the Bogdanovka mass murder, while highlighting the extemporaneous character of the most deadly single episode of the Romanian Holocaust. As this case demonstrates, even when there was no initial intent to slaughter Jews in a given area, other local circumstances and actors linked up to cause the obliteration of over 45,000 Jews in a matter of days. In the winter of 1941, the Romanian authorities’ search for solutions to two separate problems—a man-made sanitary crisis and Bucharest's intention of removing Jews from the territories under its control—closely intertwined to spark a genocidal decision. The documentation reviewed for this study provides rare insight into Romanian and German micro-cooperation on the ground, and reveals the “double functionality” logic, which formed the basis of the Axis powers’ jointly planned and implemented murder operation. Simultaneously, the paper discusses the entanglements between the issue of Jewish property, “sanitary considerations,” and the rationale for mass killings.

"Forgotten" Chapters in the History of Transcervical Sterilization: Carl Clauberg and Hans-Joachim Lindemann.

Transcervical sterilization is a non-surgical method of permanent female sterilization that is widely used and critically discussed. A review of the historiography of the method reveals that instances of its coercive use are not included in the historical account. This study offers a reexamination of the work of Carl Clauberg and Hans-Joachim Lindemann, to more deeply contextualize within the framework of current usage the coercive use of transcervical sterilization during the Third Reich and in postwar Germany. This inquiry is based on postwar criminal trial records on Clauberg, and on archival documents detailing Lindemann's activities in 1979. A comparative analysis examines arguments by medical historian Karl-Heinz Roth, and identifies shared characteristics and differences between Clauberg and Lindemann, their methods and scientific connections. The results demonstrate that the technique of transcervical sterilization has an abusive potential that may be explained as a function of the person of the physician, of the scientific method itself, and of societal and political influences. The analysis supports the argument that insights from the cases of Clauberg and Lindemann are transferrable geographically and over time, and have the potential to inform current medical practice, such as transcervical sterilization with the Essure device, whose historiographic exploration remains a desideratum.

Dealing with Desertion and Gaps in International Humanitarian Law: Changes of Allegiance in the Singapore War Crimes Trials

AbstractBy studying British Indian Army [BIA] desertions during World War II, and British postwar trial responses, this paper explores the complicated dimensions of desertion and draws attention to the need for a more explicit and comprehensive approach to desertion in international humanitarian law. The paper focuses on less known British trials dealing with desertion, namely, war crimes trials conducted by the British in Singapore. It examines how these trials dealt with contested interpretations of desertion. Drawing on lessons from these trials, the paper then highlights gaps in today’s international humanitarian law framework, specifically, the need to take into account the realities of desertion, its different permutations, and the difficulties of differentiating between prisoners of war [POWs] and deserters.

Gellately, Robert Stalin's Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War (review)

REVIEWS 767 themselves as individuals, the youngsters of 1930s Romania sought, in terms which were meaningful to them if not to us, to build a better society for the collective nation. Moreover, Clark under-estimates Legionary popularity. Even if, as he contends, the election results of 1937 were ‘still surprisingly low given the number of legionary propagandists’ (p. 153) there is, nevertheless, ample evidence to suggest that the Legion would have come second had the authorities not falsified the results. Moreover, one reason new elections were not held in March 1938 is because the authorities feared that the Legion would win the elections. Marshal Antonescu declared during his post-war trial that he was convinced that had he held elections in 1940, it would have led to an outright Legionary victory. Thus, although this volume includes much useful new information on the history and organization of the Legionary movement, it does not give the reader a real sense of why it resonated so strongly with a whole generation of Romanians. UCL SSEES Rebecca Haynes Gellately, Robert, Stalin’s Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2013. xiv + 477 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Index. £20.00. Robert Gellately has written an impressive book which considers Stalin’s policies at home and abroad during and after World War Two. It is a highly readable and engaging account of this dreadful, and yet in some ways heroic, period in Soviet history. The author has marshalled his evidence very skilfully using a wealth of primary and secondary sources, and much archival material which was previously unavailable. Gellately recounts the ruthless and frequently brutal way in which Stalin acted over the period, but suggests that Stalin did not act in this way because he was mentally unsound or just interested in power for its own sake. Instead, Gellately argues that Stalin was largely motivated by his commitment to Marxist-Leninist ideology. Thus, when Stalin expanded the Soviet empire after the war, this was not to recreate the tsarist empire, as some have suggested, but to continue the Bolshevik mission of international revolution. Stalin had promoted the idea of ‘Socialism in One Country’ at the time of the ‘Great Debate’ in the 1920s, but Gellately shows that Stalin had never given up on the idea of international revolution, and he quickly came to recognize that World War Two presented an opportunity to export Marxism-Leninism. When it comes to the Cold War, Gellately’s views on Stalin led him to adopt an Orthodox perspective. Thus, Gellately places primary blame for the Cold SEER, 94, 4, October 2016 768 War firmly on Stalin’s shoulders. The Revisionists were wrong, he writes, in suggesting that a more conciliatory stance towards the Soviet Union could have avoided the Cold War. There was nothing the West could have done to reassure Stalin and make him more compliant in Eastern Europe. ‘If anything’, writes Gellately, ‘the West was woefully complacent until 1947 or 1948 when the die was cast’ (p. 9). Indeed, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s willingness to seek compromise is criticized because it was perceived in Moscow as a sign of weakness which even ‘emboldened Stalin’ (p. 10) in his desire to expand his Soviet Empire. The book is convincing in terms of its primary purpose. The argument that Stalin was driven by a strong ideological commitment might not be entirely original but, at a minimum, writers in future will always have to take seriously this aspect of Stalin’s character. Furthermore, short of the West surrendering all of its interests in Europe, it is increasingly difficult to believe that the Cold War could have been avoided whilst Stalin was in the Kremlin. The Orthodox view was surely right at least to that extent. However, it is important scholars do not rebalance their analyses too far, as Gellately himself acknowledges. Ideology was always a factor, but power also remained central to all of Stalin’s calculations. In Eastern Europe after the war it was never enough to be a good Communist leader, you had to be a good Communist leader chosen and controlled by Stalin. Stalin was suspicious of both Tito...

Geopolitics on trial: politics and science in the wartime geopolitics of Gudmund Hatt

The history of Danish geographers during the Second World War is almost synonymous with that of Gudmund Hatt (1884–1960), the Professor of Human Geography at Copenhagen University. Hatt was a key figure in the development of Danish geography and assumed the role of a public intellectual, particularly through his geopolitical analyses as they unfolded in a staggering number of radio speeches, newspaper essays, books and articles during the late 1930s and early 1940s. But this industriousness, which accelerated during the first years of the Nazi-German occupation of Denmark (9 April 1940–5 May 1945), was also the direct reason for Hatt's hard downfall – academically as well as personally. For his wartime activities, Hatt was as the only Danish university professor tried by a post-war public servants' tribunal. It found that he had engaged in ‘dishonourable national conduct’ during the occupation and dismissed him from his professorship. Drawing on archives and published sources from the period, the paper focuses on Hatt's wartime activities and geopolitical analyses in the complicated political context of the occupation, and it pays particular attention to the conflict between ‘science’ and ‘politics’ as it crystallised in the post-war trial of Hatt.

Sweden's enormous education experiment improved longevity

Children who received an extra year of school in a post-war trial have reaped health benefits.

For an overcoat, a suitcase and an apple. Crimes against Jews hiding in the villages of Falkowa, Wieniec and Janowice in ...

The article contains a discussion and an attempt at analysis of the post-war investigation and trial materials regarding three different cases of murder or denunciation of hiding Jews by the local Polish population. The crimes discussed in the article took place in three villages, which during the occupation were located in the Cracow district: Falkowa, Wieniec and Janowice. After the war the perpetrators were indicted on the basis of the Decree of 31 August 1944, i.e. the so-called “August Decree”. According to the testimonies of the witnesses and the defendants, the main motive behind the murder of Jews or their denunciation to the occupier was the desire for quick material gain, and, secondly, the fear of the consequences if the information that the Jews were hiding in the village reached the authorities. Another important element of the incidents was the active or passive participation of numerous village dwellers in the crimes

Dla płaszcza, walizki i jabłka. Zbrodnie na Żydach ukrywających się we wsiach Falkowa, Wieniec i Janowice w świetle powojennych dokumentów procesowych

W artykule znajduje się omówienie i próba analizy powojennych materiałów śledczych i procesowych dotyczących trzech różnych przypadków mordowania lub wydawania ukrywających się Żydów w ręce władz niemieckich przez miejscową ludność polską. Omawiane w artykule zbrodnie miały miejsce w trzech wsiach, które w czasie okupacji leżały na terenie dystryktu krakowskiego: Falkowej, Wieńcu i Janowicach. Sprawcy zostali po wojnie postawieni w stan oskarżenia na podstawie Dekretu z dnia 31.08.1944, czyli tzw. dekretu sierpniowego. Z zeznań świadków i oskarżonych wynika, że głównym motywem mordowania Żydów lub wydawania ich w ręce okupanta była chęć szybkiego zysku i w drugiej kolejności strach przed konsekwencjami, gdyby informacja o ukrywających się we wsi Żydach dotarła do władz. Istotnym elementem zajść był aktywny lub bierny współudział licznych mieszkańców wsi w popełnionych zbrodniach.

Americans, Germans, and War Crimes: Converging Narratives from "the Good War"

All nations participating World War II were guilty of war crimes, although that rec ognition is subject to important qualification. German genocide as the supreme wartime offense, Japanese mass murders of Chinese, the slaughter of Polish officers by the Soviet Union?the list is hardly complete, and some would argue for the inclusion of indis criminate bombing of cities?are distinct from the smaller-scale and more spontaneous atrocities that were commonplace on all sides. The latter were often the products of combat stresses that were universal and independent of either official programs of exter mination or of ideologies and perspectives that dehumanized the enemy and encouraged the annihilation of enemy civilians as well as combatants, programs and perspectives especially characteristic of the German war against the Soviet Union. As the historian John W. Dower has shown, the antagonists' mutual perceptions of inhuman otherness lent the Pacific war its characteristic savagery. Max Hastings, discussing the murder of prisoners of war (pows) Normandy by combatants who generally recognized each other's common humanity, notes that in the heat of battle, the wake of seeing com rades die, many men found it intolerable to send prisoners to the rear knowing that they would thus survive the war, while they themselves seemed to have little prospect of do ing so. . . . it is difficult with hindsight to draw a meaningful moral distinction between the behavior of one side and the other on the battlefield. The Canadian general Chris Vokes, considering a plea for clemency from Kurt Meyer, commander of the Twelfth SS Panzer Division, who had been condemned to death a postwar trial for the murders of Canadian pows, conceded there isn't a general or colonel on the Allied side that I know of who hasn't said, 'Well, this time we don't want any prisoners.'1 Prisoners were killed reprisal for real or imagined atrocities, for the utilitarian rea son that keeping them was impractical or inconvenient, or out of frustration with a war that was going badly or was being unnecessarily prolonged by the enemy. Civilians often fell victim to the fury of ground combatants, particularly situations where occupying forces were real or imagined objects of guerrilla warfare. Due to their brutal occupation

Proces Szepsla Rotholca a polityka kary w następstwie Zagłady

This article follows the postwar trial of Shepsl Rotholc. Rotholc was a successful interwar boxer for the Jewish sports club Gwiazda who was a Polish national champion in the flyweight class. In the Warsaw ghetto he joined the ranks of the Jewish police [służba porządkowy]. After the war survivors accused Rotholc of mistreating them during deportations from the ghetto, and the Central Committee of Polish Jews (Centralny Komitet Żydów w Polsce), the principal representative of the postwar Jewish community in Poland in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, put him on trial in November 1946 in its recently established citizens’ tribunal [sąd społeczny], whose charter authorized it to determine whether a Jew suspected of reproachable behavior under the German occupation of Poland “behaved in a manner befitting a Jewish citizen” [“zachował postawę godną obywatela-Żyda”]. Rotholc was the first defendant to be tried before the citizens’ tribunal [sąd społeczny] of the CKŻP.
 At his trial Rotholc denied the charge that he had abused fellow Jews in the ghetto. By his own account, he had joined the Jewish police to support his family because under the color of his authority and thanks to his reputation in the boxing ring he was able to protect smugglers who compensated him for his assistance. He even claimed to have rescued members of his family and friends from deportation. Defense witnesses painted a different picture. His alleged victims repeated their accusations of his mistreatment of them during roundups, and postwar Jewish leaders who had taken part in the Jewish underground vilified the Jewish police in the ghetto.
 The citizens’ tribunal [sąd społeczny] of the CKŻP found Rotholc guilty of violating its charter. The basis for his conviction was not his mistreatment of fellow Jews but rather his continued service in the Jewish police after the conclusion of the first wave of deportations from Warsaw in September 1942, when, the judges reasoned, the Germans’ true intentions not to resettle but to murder the Jews of Poland was unmistakable. In accordance with sanctions authorized in its charter, the tribunal [sąd społeczny] expelled Rotholc from the Jewish community for two years, revoked his right to participate in communal activities for three years, and ordered publication of his conviction in the Jewish press. After two years Rotholc petitioned for and received a commutation of his sentence. He then left Poland and immigrated to Canada.
 After Rotholc an additional twenty-four Jewish defendants were tried in the citizens’ tribunal [sąd społeczny] of the CKŻP through the end of 1949. Of these, eighteen, including Rotholc, were found guilty, while seven were acquitted. The cases of an additional fifty suspected Jewish collaborators were dropped by lawyers for the CKŻP because of the lack of incriminating evidence. Although Rotholc’s conviction was to be expected, the subsequent record of the tribunal [sąd społeczny] suggests that it took seriously the agonizing task of identifying putative collaborators from within the ranks of the Jewish remnant in postwar Poland and acted with a fair share of judicial integrity.

Cheering the Traitor: The Post-War Trial of Chen Bijun, April 1946

Cheering the Traitor: The Post-War Trial of Chen Bijun, April 1946

Cheering the Traitor: The Post-War Trial of Chen Bijun, April 1946

Cheering the Traitor: The Post-War Trial of Chen Bijun, April 1946

Cheering the Traitor: The Post-War Trial of Chen Bijun, April 1946

Cheering the Traitor: The Post-War Trial of Chen Bijun, April 1946

Nurses in Nazi Germany: Moral Choice in History

This book tells the story of German nurses who, directly or indirectly, participated in the Nazis' euthanasia measures against patients with mental and physical disabilities, measures that claimed well over 100,000 victims from 1939 to 1945. How could men and women who were trained to care for their patients come to kill or assist in murder or mistreatment? This is the central question pursued by Bronwyn McFarland-Icke as she details the of nurses from the beginning of the Weimar Republic through the years of National Socialist rule. Rather than examine what the Party did or did not order, she looks into the hearts and minds of people whose complicity in murder is not easily explained with reference to ideological enthusiasm. Her book is a micro-history in which many of the most important ethical, social, and cultural issues at the core of Nazi genocide can be addressed from a fresh perspective. McFarland-Icke offers gripping descriptions of the conditions and practices associated with psychiatric nursing during these years by mining such sources as nursing guides, personnel records, and postwar trial testimony. Nurses were expected to be conscientious and friendly caretakers despite job stress, low morale, and Nazi propaganda about patients' having lives unworthy of living. While some managed to cope with this situation, others became abusive. Asylum administrators meanwhile encouraged nurses to perform with as little disruption and personal commentary as possible. So how did nurses react when ordered to participate in, or tolerate, the murder of their patients? Records suggest that some had no conflicts of conscience; others did as they were told with regret; and a few refused. The remarkable accounts of these nurses enable the author to re-create the drama taking place while sharpening her argument concerning the ability and the willingness to choose.

Kurt Vonnegut's Three Mother Night s

Kurt Vonnegut's Three Mother Nights Edward Jamosky and Jerome Klinkowitz (bio) Kurt Vonnegut's third novel, Mother Night, dates from the period when his writing career was in disorder and his publications were taking odd and various forms. The majority of Vonnegut's work in the 1950s had been short fiction produced for weekly general audience magazines such as Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post, but as these journals went out of business, the author was forced to search for new sources of income, which in 1959 he found in the growing industry of paperback originals. The Sirens of Titan was published by Dell that year, earning Vonnegut about the same amount as a well-paying short story and teaching him that advances from such firms were a source of ready money (McCabe 94-95). Mother Night was Vonnegut's second effort in this new direction, and its format and production were geared specifically to the style of pulp paperbacks. Fawcett's 35¢ "Gold Medal" original was presented not as fiction but as fact, "An American traitor's astonishing confession—mournfully macabre, diabolically funny—written with unnatural candor in a foreign death cell," according to the volume's cover. Printed and distributed in February 1962, this edition of Mother Night appealed to the timeliness of wartime memoirs then available and to interest in the trial of the accused Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann. Significantly, in a way that influences the novel's text, Vonnegut abetted this historical interest by framing the body of his work with a similar set of inducements to a factual reading: an "Editor's Note," signed by himself, preceding the narrative identified by a second title page as "The Confessions of Howard W. Campbell, Jr.," together with Campbell's own purported dedication of his work. This editor's note is important because in two subsequent editions Vonnegut added successive frames that threw not only the body of the novel but the "editing process" itself into new perspective, effectively changing the way in which Mother Night is read. The 1962 Fawcett Edition (published in Greenwich, CT) consists of the novel with Vonnegut's Editor's Note; the 1966 hardcover Harper & Row edition (New York) retains these features, plus adds a new "Introduction" concluding with the dateline "Iowa City, 1966" (where Vonnegut was then teaching in the University of Iowa Writers Workshop), detailing what the author describes as "My personal experience with Nazi Monkey business" and identifying the novel's moral; and a 1984 underground Polish edition (published in Warsaw by Niezalezna Oficyna Wydawnicza, which means "unofficial publishing house") adds a third piece of apparatus, "Przedmowa do Wydania Polskiego" ("Preface to the Polish Edition"), signed by Vonnegut and dated "Manhattan Island / 14 lipiec [July] 1984," which precedes both the 1962 note and 1966 Introduction and places the novel in a new perspective for Polish readers. Both theme and technique in Mother Night are successively recharacterized by the frames Vonnegut has added to his text. The novel itself explores the oddities of twentieth-century behavior and ascribes them to a style of schizophrenia [End Page 216] that allows persons and nations to indulge in pretenses and divided loyalties. Ostensibly the confessions of an American expatriate who serves the Nazis as a propagandist while sending out coded messages to the Allies, Mother Night develops as a story that not only plays both sides at the same time but accomplishes opposites at once: Howard Campbell is not only the most effective German broadcaster, prolonging the war long beyond the average citizen's willingness to fight, but he becomes the very best anti-German spy, speeding the Allied victory. On the eve of his postwar trial for crimes against humanity, Campbell discards a letter of exoneration from his American spy-master to accept guilt for crimes against himself and prepares for his own self-execution. As with all other facets of this novel, however—which include such rebounding absurdities as Roosevelt chuckling in glee at the obscenity of Campbell's anti-Semitic broadcasts and Hitler brought to tears by the sentiments of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address—the ending is an open one, inviting double meanings, for Campbell's final...

The crime of Klaus Croissant

Klaus who? To most people in West Germany, the 1931-born liberal lawyer is the devil in disguise. In their opinion, he and his colleagues, notably Lang, Newerla, Groenewold and Str~Sbele were busy smuggling escape and attack plans from one prisoner's cell to the other or from the incarcerated heads of the Red Army Faction (RAF), popularly known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, to still fugitive soldiers of the urban guerilla while pretending to mind their own business as lawyers of the defense in Germany's most exciting post-war conspiracy trial. Popular emotions were running high: the BaaderMeinhofs, it must be known, had placed a bomb in the headquarters of the Fifth U.S.Army command in Frankfurt, killing three U.S. citizens in an at tempt to protest the American Vietnam policy and Germany's tacit support of the logistic operations needed to carry through President Nixon's bombing warfare in Indochina. But other groups had, long after Baader and Meinhof, continued the armed struggle: they had kidnapped a politician and shot a banker, an industrialist and a judge, also killing policemen and bodyguards. A few more bombing and bomb scares had officially been attributed to "the terrorists". Croissant, in the eyes of the masses, in collaboration with his colleagues masterminded the continuing guerilla operations after Baader and Meinhof had been arrested. Others defined him not as the Godfather but as the "mailman" for arsonists and police murderers [ 1]. He had "subordinated himself to the plans and goals of the conspiracy as one of its members" [2]. Notwithstanding this ambiguity in his public image Godfather or humble servant of terrorists Croissant and his colleagues had to be stopped at all costs. It was so easy and yet so difficult. Croissant and his colleagues had hardly been accepted by the court as defense lawyers for the five accused, when they were, half a year later, in 1975, excluded. It took only two weeks to pass a law providing for the possibility of the exclusion of lawyers. Information about the defense strategy was collected by periodical cell raids and continuous marl-inspection by the Secret Service. "We're not going to curb the legitimate rights of the defense", a member of Parliament said in the debate preceding this law. "We're solely aiming at lawyers pursuing their revolutionary battle