TRYING THE WAR CRIMINALS.

Hokitika Guardian, 20 July 1921, Page 4

TRYING THE WAR CRIMINALS.

(By G. Ward Price)

LEIPZIG, May 31

Leipzig is doing its deliberate best to ignore th© trials of war criminals that are going on in the German Supreme Court, which, after the huge railway station, is the city’s proudest monument.

The local newspapers urge the townspeople to display “national dignity” by repressing their curiosity and affecting to ignore the presence <>t English counsel and English witnesses The only manifestation of hostility of which of which T have so far heard occurred when a German patriot pursued a small page-hoy who was carrying one of my telegrams and wrathfnlly ordered him to tear it up. His fury frightened the hoy so much, however, that the lad ran all the rest of the way to the telegraph office, with the result that the message got off five minutes earlier than it would otherwise have done.

In procedure a German court has by no means the dramatic interest of an English trial. There is no keen play of cross-examination, none of the remote dignity surrounding a bewigged and silent judgo.

The president of the court does all the talking, and is tho hardsstworked man in the case. All examination and cross-examination must be done through him. He even administers the oath to the witnesses. Ho sits in tho middle of his six fellow-judges at a horseshoe-shaped baize-covered, table, all of them wearing marooncolored velvet-faced silk gowns, round velvet caps, and enormous white bows, Tike exaggerated evening dross ties with a Scots parson’s white bands hanging below them. Dr Schmidt, the presiding judge, looks like a rather jovial retired major, and is very dignified and measured of speech. He is evidently pleased with the 'English witnesses, and has several times remarked that they seem intelligent and trust-worthy.

Bad though the charges are which we have so far heard, one feels impotently conscious all the while of how inadequately they represent the black mountain of German war atrocities. And what the German witnesses ns well as the prisoners say is a constant reminder that not the individual cruelty of one man here and there was T®-

sponsible for the accumulation of tins mass of guilt, but that it was the deliberate practice of the Prussian militai’v system to employ rutlilessness as a weapon and that this spirit was imbibed by almost every man in its service

Mild-mannered, handsome General vuit T’ransecky, the German military expert at the trial, would shoot down defenceless prisoners who refused . to work without the least compunction, lie read out of a military code hook issued by the War Ministry in Berlin that this was the proper thing to do. and for him it is ns unquestionable as an axion of Euclid. The whole trial is much more conversational and informal than it would he in England. “What have you to say to that ?” th<> judge frequentP, asks the prisoner when something particularly damaging is said by one of the witnesses. The prisoner sits behind a low rail, by the side of his counsel, and there is no warder except- a policeman at the door.

Tho court is in session for more than eight hours each day. It meets at nine and sits, with a ten minutes’ interval, till two. At four it begins again, and continues till eight, or even later. Though most of the time there is not more than a hundred people present, the atmosphere gets heavy and close, and with the strain of trying to hear a foreign language in a room which must he the worst for acoustics ever built, our British counsel have got visibly paler since tho proceedings began.