GENERAL VON FALKENHAUSEN
SIR,—I read with keen interest Mr. Witham's letter in your columns about the case of General von Falkenhausen, the anti-Nazi officer who, having been condemned to Dachau and later to death by Hitler, was " liberated " by U.S troops on the actual eve of his execution, and is being held indefinitely behind the wire in the American Zone.
Whilst in Belgium with our naval forces in 1944-5 as a war cor- respondent, I heard many first-hand tributes to his conduct as governor, one from a family of Jews he saved from deportation. At Dachau, Falkenhausen was subjected to the worst insults of the S.S. for his success in restraining their sadistic impulses in the Low Countries.
It is a sad comment on Allied justice that this septuagenarian survivor of the July Plot, who, as Chief of Staff to Chiang Kai-shek, was fighting China's battle against Japan in 1935, should, two years after V.E.-Day, find himself with his home destroyed, his assets frozen, his wife wounded by a stray American shot and himself, in his twenty-seventh concentration camp, still ignorant of his future.
It appears that his detention is, to everyone but himself, his family, and friends, a " formality," as he remains on the French list of war criminals for having been for a time governor of Northern France, and that, although no specific charges are made against him, no one will take the responsi- bility to carder his release.
Those of us who were active friends of Free France in 1940 would be the happiest of any if the Fourth Republic could cut through this skein of red tape that is breaking the health, the prospects and the heart of an honourable and innocent man.—I am, Sir, yours faithfully, GEORGE EDINGER.
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