WAR CRIMES: For Good Behavior

Scarcely had the prison doors closed on the last German war criminal to be convicted by the Allies (TIME, Dec. 26) when they opened again for the first batch to be paroled. A few days before Christmas, 54 second-string war criminals were released from Landsberg, the gloomy fortress prison where 25 years ago Adolf Hitler wrote Mein Kampf; their sentences did not expire until next year, but U.S. authorities cut them short for “good behavior.”

The prisoners seemed well-fed and healthy as they slipped out to freedom. Georg von Schnitzler, a onetime director of Germany’s vast I.G. Farben trust, was whisked off by a chauffeur in a black limousine. But most of the paroled men trudged to the railway station near the prison, carrying boxes and bundles. Most were in good humor, but one growled darkly: “Things will change.” Another added: “And then those who are out right now will be in.”

The holiday season also brought hope of freedom to thousands of second-string collaborators still in French jails. Premier Bidault’s cabinet last week approved a bill, which will shortly go to the French Assembly, granting amnesty to several categories, of collaborators, including those sentenced to national “unworthiness” or “degradation” for minor dealings with the enemy.

Meanwhile the Assembly received a progress report on the work of France’s courts trying collaboration cases: to date, they have imposed 7,100 death sentences (4,400 of them in absentia), of which about 800 have actually been carried out; 3,000 sentences to hard labor for life; 39,000 sentences of hard labor, military confinement or simple imprisonment.