Hitler's Executioner

She has completely lost her sense of time when the president and the associate judges re-enter the courtroom to pronounce sentence. Once again, Freisler’s piercing voice rings out:

‘Defendant Sensfuss – stand!’

Not guilty!

‘Defendant Törber – stand!’

Not guilty!

Margot sees a glimmer of hope. If the other two were acquitted, I might get away with only a prison sentence …

‘Defendant von Schade – stand!’

Margot’s gaze is fixed straight ahead.

The court retires to consider its verdict. But is that verdict not a foregone conclusion? Margot von Schade sits depressed and uneasy on her chair. Time appears to stand still. She feels as if she were in a vacuum.

Roland Freisler was no demon from the pit of hell; he was a typical representative of the German people. His career was a German career. He was the merciless agent of a merciless judiciary, a consistent accomplice to a murderous system, an exemplary murderer in judge’s robes – and it was the Germans who made his deeds, his influence and his career possible.

In the 1970s, Hans Filbinger, prime minister of the federal state of Baden-Württemberg, hit the headlines when it was revealed that he had been responsible for death sentences as a wartime judge in the navy. Eventually, this led to his resignation – which was not entirely voluntary and not exactly typical for post-war Germany. At the time, author and playwright Rolf Hochhuth coined the term ‘furchtbarer Jurist’ (dreadful lawyer), and even today, these dreadful lawyers still maintain that the sentences they pronounced were legitimate.

The fact is, Freisler was no demon in a red robe. He was simply a particularly consistent executor of the National Socialists’ interpretation of the law.

Is the post-war generation, the generation to which I belong and which, to put it in the words of former German chancellor Helmut Kohl, enjoyed ‘the mercy of late birth’, now eager to draw a line under a dark but not too distant past?