Rough Justice
Two curiosities of justice which have occurred during the last week deserve not to be overlooked, and it is to be presumed that if Parliament was sitting they would receive attention. The first is the release of eight German war criminals, all of whom were serving sentences after being convicted of such crimes as using slave labour, atrocities against civilians, and various other examples of the sort of conduct which jurists class as " crimes against humanity." They owe their happy release to a revised assessment of the amount of time which can be remitted for good conduct. Their conduct in all cases having been good, out they come. It may or may not he a good thing for Western Germany to have these people at large, who have one thing in common, that they were all active and influential Nazis. What is odd is that men like Weizsacker and Falkenhausen, who were within their limits active anti-Nazis, should remain behind bars. This matter is primarily the concern of the-Americans (or, in the case of Falkenhausen, of the Belgians) and not therefore one in which this country can intervene directly. But the second judicial curiosity is purely domestic. One soldier has been sentenced by court martial to three years' imprisonment and another to nine months' detention for undisclosed offences—section 41 of the Army Act, under which they were tried, being too generally phrased to give any precise indication of the charges against them. The court sat in camera—a precaution that is always accepted as reasonable when matters affecting security form part of the evidence. But that anyone should be today in prison for a (publicly) unspecified crime is the thin end of the most dangerous of all wedges.
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