Foreign News: Seven Who Must Hang

A photograph of six exhumed corpses —U.S. airmen who had bailed out of their bomber over Germany—was telling testimony. The eleven German civilians on trial at Darmstadt for murdering the men winced at the exhibit. Grandmotherly, grey-haired Frau Margarete Witzler turned her head away.

The trial droned on. The U.S. military judges heard how the eleven defendants, all citizens of Rüsselsheim, had lynched the fliers in a spasm of revenge. The court’s verdict: freedom for one defendant, long imprisonment for three, death for seven. Among them: Frau Witzler. She was an old woman; she must have been a big girl when Adolf Hitler, the Führer, was born.

Perhaps, if he had never lived, she would have rounded out her days puttering over flowers or watching children with that shrewd pity which results from old people’s knowledge that every lifetime is short, that even children do not have long to live. Now she would die, a little prematurely, on the gallows. Frau Witzler listened carefully to the sentence, hid her face in her hands, wept quietly.