Correspondents' Correspondence

...This is not how many of us would wish it to be, and perhaps a renewal of interest in the Common Market can be conjured up yet--when the time comes, the Tories under Ted Heath will almost certainly run a campaign that Labor will find embarrassing to oppose...

...In the Eichmann case, the Israeli court said that 'the degree of responsibility increases as we draw further away from the man who uses the fatal instrument with his own hand.' But this is not how German criminal law works...

...The trial drags on month after month with thorough attention to detail, but its central point--the individual's criminal responsibility for supporting a system gone mad--is apparently lost, no matter the outcome...

...Should the ss Hauptsturmfuhrer be convicted and the maximum term under the unusual ground rules of the proceedings here, he will be imprisoned roughly 20 minutes for each of the 400,000 murders of which he stands accused...

...and the political opposition is not, on the face of it...

...Some may argue that Britain's entry into the eec will not be the product of a truly democratic decision...

...the promarketeers hardly amount to more than a tepid 30 per cent...

...The upshot seems to be that if Britain does go in, it will be thanks to a tacit alliance among the organs of the Establishment and the party leaderships (they could count on at least three-quarters of the House of Commons on a free vote), and not to a general popular assent...

...Earlier in this lengthy trial he was shown a large plan of the camp...

...As they were herded off the trains, many of the victims still believed they were on their way to colonizing the East...

...Well, we British won't know for some months, perhaps years--which is one reason why it is so hard to get up any head of enthusiasm or, for that matter, disapproval about the whole thing...

...Britain will not be kept out of the eec by Enoch Powell and his freebooters on the Right (although Geoffrey Rippon, now our man in Brussels, is also a Right-winger) or by the Left of the labor party, which persists in seeing the Market as some kind of imperialist plot...

...It sometimes seems that the trial is a study commission of disinterested scholars, conducted for the benefit of future historians, rather than a means of administering justice...

...The Brazilian government agreed to extradite him only on condition that his sentence would not exceed 15 years...

...the leaders of the three parties are all committed to the Market...

...German law distinguishes between a situation where a man has no choice but to obey orders and one where he is an accessory to the crime...

...Here, at last, the industrialist of death failed...

...At one, you were told to hand over your coat, hat and suit in exchange for a string...

...Yet the man responsible for developing Treblinka's murderous factory through the introduction of modern industrial techniques--the man who said he discouraged "pointless" sadism--has told the court: "You can ask me any questions you like...

...at the next you were ordered to tie your shoes together with the string and hand them over...

...Such a plebiscite at the moment would, I fear, give a majority to an unholy alliance of Enoch Powell and Michael Foot...

...And then, of course, the young are more concerned with other matters...

...formidable...

...less than two years later, Czechoslovakia is quite forgotten...

...Now 62, thin and alert, Stangl maintains the bearing of a small-town schoolmaster...

...Degraded to the point where they had become mere useful slaves to the system, these living dead of Treblinka successfully mutinied against their well trained, armed and fed guards in August 1943...

...Still, most Englishmen have never regarded "pure" expressions of public will--like the Gaullist-type referendum--as the acme of democracy...

...One can only hope that once the terms of entry are known, the liberal-minded "silent majority" will emerge from their apathy and support Europe.--John Mander...

...But despite the absence of strong feelings on either side, the opinion polls show a clear majority now against "going into Europe...

...Three quarters of an hour, door-to-door, compared to an hour and a quarter, sometimes even as much as two hours with the old system...

...But by the time Stangl had established his new system, according to the testimony of a survivor, "it took no more than three quarters of an hour, by the clock, to put the victims through their last voyage, from the moment the doors of the cattle cars were unbolted to the moment the great trap doors of the gas chambers were opened to take out the bodies...

...I spent a recent afternoon listening to written testimonies collected abroad being read aloud, just for the record, and watching members of the court sinking into light sleep.--Thomas Land Democracy and the EEC London--Are we in or out of the Common Market...

...Franz Lukas, an Auschwitz gas-chamber worker, was recently acquitted in Frankfurt because he had only followed commands...

...I have done nothing to anybody that was not my duty, and my conscience is clear...

...he did not hesitate for a moment to elaborate on his record, even to the most minute and grisly details...

...This Bonn has agreed to observe...

...When Stangl took over the camp, his lawyer said, "There were bodies lying about all over the place, no proper system of burial...

...Much more serious, however, has been the erosion of support among the intelligentsia, corresponding pretty much to that among the population as a whole...

...Naive thinking, to be sure...

...Finally, whip-wielding guards would chase you--winded victims are killed quicker by gas--along a road, and in a state of helpless panic, into the gas chambers...

...Indeed, the entire war-crimes case, the biggest ever handled by German courts, has been marked by an odd detachment from the awful human consequences of Treblinka's efficiency...

...The masses seemed happy to float along with the conviction of their masters: that since the Europeans had experienced an "economic miracle" within their Common Market (actually, the miracle had got under way before the European Economic Community was set up), it was only necessary for Britain to join and, presto!, it would have its miracle too...

...As a vital executive of the Third Reich's extermination machinery, Stangl had no doubt been under strict controls and thus may not be sentenced to the full 15-year term...

...To be sure, not even the Treblinka survivors are after the blood of the sick old man...

...20 Minutes Per Murder Dusseldorf--At the court of Justice in this prosperous industrial city on the Rhine, Franz-Paul Stangl, commander of Poland's Treblinka extermination camp, awaits the conclusion of his war-crimes trial...

...The third most wanted German war criminal--after Hitler's deputy Martin Bormann and the notorious Auschwitz "doctor" Joseph Mengele--Stangl was uncovered last year in Brazil, betrayed by his son-in-law for $7,000...

...True, the Establishment is still strongly pro-Europe...

...The crime is so enormous that justice seems impossible...

...The Market is simply no cure-all for Britain's structural weaknesses...

...This is a marked difference from 1961-63, when the Establishment (the City, the Foreign Office, the Treasury, the Confederation of British Industry), the intelligentsia and indeed the overwhelming number of citizens appeared to favor "going in...

...The threat of Communism appears to have receded...

...If the last decade's hopes were false, the current change of mood is real enough...

...Like most British, the intelligentsia is in some ways probably more insular today than it was 10 years ago...

...it was a record...

...The most peculiar aspect of the trial," commented one authoritative observer, "is the prosecution's persistent attempt to prove Stangl guilty of torturing or murdering a single person with his own hands...

...The huge black-and-white plan of the camp came alive as witnesses took the stand to testify...

...Perhaps Stangl, too, was able to recall the friendly, green railway station where the tracks ended and the painted clock on the wall always showed three o'clock...

...Before the travel-worn families could catch their breath, men and women were separated and rushed through a series of check points...

...To make the extermination machine function, Stangl had to establish a large prisoner work force at the bottom of the camp's social triangle (the ss being on top and the Ukrainian guards in the middle) to handle the bodies and prepare the valuables, clothes and hair for transport to Germany...

...then your underwear was taken, your hair cut off, and your privates searched for money and jewels...

...Have the British radically altered their views, or was the consensus of 1961-63 rather more artificial than it seemed at the time...

...It was this revolt and the ensuing escapes that gave the trial its first-hand testimonies...

...Most people would probably agree that the consensus of the early '60s was built on fairly flimsy foundations...

...Although not anti-internationalist--being occupied with Vietnam, Rhodesia, Greece--they are unresponsive to the emphasis pro-Europeans tend to place on the staggering material recovery of Europe...

...Counsel for the defense argued that the attentive little man in the dock had no alternative to processing people on the conveyor belt of death...

...The savage efficiency of Treblinka, surpassed only by Auschwitz, brought death to well over 700,000 people who were gassed, shot, beaten and tortured to expiration by the ss and its Ukrainian guards...