'nth LEIPZIG TRIALS.* Tan highest German tribunal last summer tried
six German soldiers and sailors accused of atrocious cruelty to British soldiers and sailors during the War ; it found five of them guilty and condemned them to short terms of imprisonment. These Leipzig trials were loudly denounced in some quarters as a mere travesty of justice, because the sentences were absurdly inade- quate. We ventured to point out that the trials were significant because of the convictions. German judges had condemned five German soldiers and sailors for breaches of the ordinary laws of war and of humanity. That seemed to us a new and memorable fact, which suggested that Germany was beginning to repent of the barbarities of her old military code. We are glad to find that our view of the case is elaborated and rein- forced in a very able book on the trials by Mr. Claud Mullins. He acted as interpreter to the British Mission at Leipzig, and his narrative of the proceedings and his comments are clear, judicious and enlightening. Mr. Mullins holds no brief for the Germans, but, like a true Englishman, he desires to be scrupulously fair to them, and to show what the trials meant to the German public. When all the circumstances are taken into account, and especially what seems to us the absurd deference paid by German civilians to anyone in uniform, with the still more ridiculous idea of a
• The Leipzig Trials : an Account of the War Crintinali Trials and a Study 51Q:snail Mentality. By Used Mullins. London : Witherby. Gd. net.]
German soldier's " honour," we are bound to conclude with Mr. Mullins that the apparently trivial punishments inflicted on the convicted men will have a considerable moral effect in Germany.
Mr. Mullins explains that the British Government put forward only six test cases, in which the evidence seemed overwhelm.
ing, and that we left the German legal authorities to deal with these cases in their own way. The German procedure is, from an English standpoint, most unsatisfactory, as the judge may call only such witnesses as he desires to hear and there is no effective cross-examination. German lawyers are, indeed, still in the mediaeval stage of their evolution. But Mr. Mullins thinks that tie presiding judge, Dr. Schmidt, honestly strove to elicit the truth and that he treated the British witnesses fairly. Dr. Schmidt had to administer the German Code, and therefore was compelled to make full allowance for culprits who could
plead that they had obeyed orders, however brutal ; furthermore, he had to take cognizance of what we should regard as trifles—
calling a prisoner " Pig dog "—while overlooking serious offences.
Yet with all these limitations Dr. Schmidt and his colleagues were constrained to convict five of the six accused, although the German military and naval representatives justified their abominable crimes, while counsel for the defence made patriotic harangues in the familiar style to exercise moral pressure on the court. It is worth while to recall the cases. Sergeant Heynen, charged with gross cruelty to British prisoners at a coal mine in Westphalia in 1915, was sent to gaol for ten months. Captain Mtiller, who had caused the death of many British soldiers in a foul prison camp at Flavy-le-Martel in 1918, was sent to gaol for six months. Private Neumann, for brutality to British prisoners at Pommerensdorf in 1917, was sentenced to six months' imprisonment. Captain Neumann, who sank the hospital ship ` Dover Castle' in the Mediterranean, was acquitted because he had acted under orders from the German Admiralty. Lieutenants Dithmar and Boldt, who with their superior, Commander Patzig, of U 86,' had torpedoed the hospital ship Llandovery Castle' and then destroyed all but one of the lifeboats, full of nurses, sick men and sailors, by gunfire and ramming, were sent to gaol for four years, on the ground that " the killing of defenceless shipwrecked people is an act in the highest degree contrary to ethical principles." Boldt has since escaped—perhaps with the connivance of his gaolers. Seven Belgian and French cases were also tried, but only one of these resulted in a conviction.
Mr. Mullins admits that from a purely legal standpoint the trials achieved little. There was no recognized international code by which to try the culprits. The German's respect for the orders of a superior was fundamentally opposed to our ideas. Even the sinking of a hospital ship—an act of which naked savages would be ashamed—proved not to be an offence in the eyes of German judges if it had been ordered from Berlin. But Mr. Mullins is surely right in contending that from the political and moral standpoint the trials marked a distinct advance. They " established the principle that individual atrocities committed during a war may be punished when the
war is over." Again, " the Germans who were condemned at Leipzig were really paying the penalty for the spirit of barbarism which had been so assiduously taught in Germany before the War." The fact that German soldiers and sailors were sent to gaol as ordinary criminals—not to a fortress as heroes—by a civilian court marked a new era for Germany. The German Government had systematically practised atrocities in the hope of winning the War, and that evil system was implicitly condemned at Leipzig by the German Supreme Court. Mr. Mullins maintains that it was infinitely more important to get the German judges, trying these cases after their own fashion, to convict the fivo men than for us to try the accused before a British court and give them less inadequate punishment than they received. The real object was not to exact vengeance for the past, but to issue a warning for the future. The six accused, with many other ruffians of the same type, ought no doubt to have been tried by court-martial and shot, but in that case the lesson of the Leipzig trials would have been lost.
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