Trial History and Verdict

Mainz, 10 Jul.

At the court, it was like a scene from Wallenstein's camp.  A juror stretched out on a bench in the corridor, nearly prostrate after hours of inactive waiting on this very hot July day.  Werner, a diabetic, had to be helped to a chair.  Judges, attorneys and audience at the NS-trial wandered the hallways, fanning themselves, or retired to the coolest corners of the Justice Building.  Every one of them was waiting for the decision of the Mainz substitute judges, Drs. Jahnhorst, Lorentz, and van Kruechten.  At intervals news of "only an hour more" gave encouragement or the occasion to send someone from a group out for drinks and refreshments.

Those who sayed to the end of  this last of in all eighty session of the Schwurgericht [Assizes] (which a humorist among the audience dubbed the "Flurgericht" on account of the many pauses for consultation) [an untranslatable joke based on the rhyme Schwur/Flur, where Flur = hall] learned, after the tenth evening hour, that this trial was at an end, without having reached a verdict.

At the end of a hot day

The three substitute judges reached this "verdict" after a twelve-hour-long internal examination called by the defense, on the question of whether the three professional jurors in the Windisch/Werner trial could still be regarded as impartial or if they'd trespassed the highest rule of justice in that they knew of the existence of the Landgericht president's bugging device, and denied their knowledge to the defense,  in order not to give them grounds for a tehcnicality.  The three substitute judges ruled the defense allegations valid, and excused their three collegues on grounds of possible partiality.  The accused Werner received the news at the university clinic, where he had been brought in danger of corporeal collapse before the end of a hot day brought a hot decision brought about by a hot wire.

Love of high-tech

The "hot wire" that brought to an end this trial after three-fourths of a year, in which costs of about 600,000 Marks had been incurred, is a copper cable scarcely longer than 3 meters, that the superintendant of the Mainz Justice Building, along with another employee called in to expedite matters, installed one Saturday morning during Carneval between the second floor office of the 58-year old Landgericht president Max van de Sand and the court room lying directly overhead.  Up there he connected it cleanly to a microphone in a corner of the room.  In the president's office, a somewhat antiquated speaker of the size used in street processions, mounted on a tripod, provided transmission.  The Mainz Landgericht president has enjoyed boradcast technology since the time he served in a news capacity during the war and learned cable laying himself.

What was the cable, characterized by angry attorneys as a bug, but which the president called a listening device, which is a very fine distinction, was supposed to be for, has not to now been clarified.  Different versions  go from "pure technical games", to a "possibility for improving the educational level of future jurors" or as far as "listening in to conversations between the accused and their defense team".

To distinguish the right one will be the object of a disciplinary hearing, which  Rheinland-Pfalz Justice Minister Schneider announced on Wednesday through the Ministry Press Office.  The result can be a reproval for the president (to whose absolute integrity his professional colleagues otherwise attest), or in a worse case, a transfer or early retirement.  And in the worst case it could, end in a Recourse Proceeding, so that the 600,000 mark expenditure isn't lost entirely.

Talk of the Judges' Table

By the way:  the president's desires to hear the proceedings didn't appear remarkable just to outsiders, and questionable to the jurists (According to the legal interpretation of the Oberlandesgerichts in Cologne one must proceed from the consideration that personal civil liberties do not permit a proceeding to be broadcast beyond the extent of a court room for uncontrolled listening in without the permission of all involved)  but even more so the fact that the three professional jurors, who were working hard for nine months on the mass murder trial against the former NS functionaries Windisch and Werner knew nothing, or more exactly:  for a long time knew nothing of this installation.  Because at one of the Judge's Tables which meet every first Friday of the month, on 5 April, the Landgericht president informed his colleagues that he'd had this installation constructed.  The colleagues had misgivings, and the president pulled the cable out and put the speaker back in storage.  Since then the installation has been judged non-functional.

As has been said:  the three professional jurors knew nothing of this Table talk, and therefore considered what they heard some weeks later only a rumor:  that such an installation existed.  Personally engaged, the three men made a search for hidden connections to the loudspeaker system.  Not versed technically, they found nothing and went back to work.  Only when the rumor, a bit less clear, reached them a second time, they informed the judge's panel and only then did the president receive an the urgent suggestion to remove the cable.

The cable still in the wall

By the way:  The cable is still in the wall today and defenders of the two men accused of mass murder of Ukrainian [sic] Jews and Gypsies used the fact that they weren't informed of this "hot wire" (Which the court had actually failed to do) to bring a charge of partiality, which, after some byways via the decision of the Substitute panel led to success.  That the [defense] attorneys are very satisfied, is clear.

But that the trial ended in general celebration cannot be said.  The actual mass murder trial, which in recent time had turned into a jurists' battle, at whose end even the recording clerk had been recused for partiality, was close to conclusion, and stood - to the extent discernible from transcriptions -  not particularly favorably toward the two accused.  When the two will have to appear for a new trial, no one knows.  Werner (61) will probably be declared unfit to stand trial on account of his diabetes.

Many of the witnesses, of whom some travelled from the US and Israel, have already announced they will not return a second time.

Copyright © 2001 Irene Newhouse
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