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222 MURDER AND MARTIAL JUSTICE CHAPTER 18 Afterwards Before the War Department abandoned its project of bringing Nazi terrorists to justice, it reopened a cold case. A German prisoner unexpectedly confessed to helping beat Hugo Krauss to death in December 1943 at Camp Hearne, Texas. Krauss was the prisoner whose unhappy American relatives had embarrassed the War Department. The confessor, Guenther miesel, had not even been a suspect when Krauss’s death had been investigated. in fact, miesel had been trusted enough to drive newly repaired trucks from one army base to another. on one trip he had stopped to help a young woman with car trouble. it was love at first sight, sustained by letters and a few clandestine meetings. “she was a Christian and she hoped that i, dearest Guenther, loved Jesus too,” he told a chaplain. Her influence caused this former member of Hitler youth “agony and conflict in [his] soul,” particularly when she told him that unless he repented and accepted Jesus, his sins could not be forgiven. “she did not have the faintest clue of how grave and serious my sins were.” He expected her to abandon him when he told her that he had helped kill a man, but she only urged him to confess the crime. And so this new convert did, to an astonished American officer. miesel and six others were court-martialed at Camp swift in Bastrop, Texas, in January 1946 and condemned to life in prison at hard labor. However , only three months later, the Judge Advocate General’s review board canceled two convictions and reduced the remaining sentences to ten or fifteen years. meisel was to serve fifteen at Fort Leavenworth.1 Another PoW murder case was reopened when someone at the Pentagon asked why erich menschner should be serving twenty years at Fort Leaven222 AFTERWARDS 223 worth for inciting the group which had killed Hans Geller, while his handson murderers had gone free. By then, these individuals were lost among the thousands of prisoners being sent home or to forced labor. A few of these suspects were finally located at Fort eustis, Virginia, where, having been labeled “white” (good, anti-Nazi) Germans, they were enrolled in a crash course on “historical and ethical truth as conceived by Western Civilization,” which would supposedly make them reliable democrats in postwar Germany.2 in late september 1946 the Adjutant General ordered the Commander of the First Army in New york to investigate Geller’s murder more thoroughly .3 on February 5, 1947, he reported that three of the ten available suspects deserved prosecution. However, he added, the evidence against them was “conflicting, fragmentary, secondary and inconclusive.” A guilty verdict would depend, greatly or wholly, on their willingness to incriminate themselves. The trial would be “expensive in time and money,” unpredictable in outcome, and furthermore pointless: “The current policy of the under secretary of War, acting through his Clemency Boards, is to repatriate immediately prisoners of war convicted by general court-martial of offenses solely against their fellow prisoners, not involving United States personnel or property, and to remit all sentences effective upon repatriation”! Because no sentence would ever be enforced, it would save time and money to repatriate these suspects immediately.4 The secretary of War’s office agreed. it was a new, cold war world. John mcCloy, former secretary stimson’s man, who was now High Commissioner for Germany, was engaged in releasing major war criminals and restoring fortunes swollen by slave labor. it seems that Drechsler’s seven killers had not been unrealistic to hope for mercy, merely unfortunate in their timing. so the available members of the “rollkommando” allegedly ordered by the Nazi “soldatenrat” to lynch Hans Geller escaped all punishment. A clemency board reconsidered the case of edgar menschner, the alleged Führer of this soldatenrat, on November 27, 1946. Though all of the board commissioners rated menschner’s conduct in confinement as “excellent,” two of them opposed any reduction of his twenty-year sentence. The other two suggested ten years. The Judge Advocate General’s office decided that five years sufficed.5 one assumes that menschner was eventually reunited with his family. The clemency boards also repeatedly reviewed the sentences of Hugo Krauss’s killers, each time with less hostility toward them. in 1948 President Truman reduced miesel’s sentence to ten years. in 1949, after serving only three years, all five men returned home, freed on parole.6 [18.191.239.123] Project MUSE (2024...

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