Foreign News: In Hameln Town

If the Nazi Joseph Kramer, the "Beast of Belsen," had any professional interest left, he must have been amused at the bungling British. The British military executioner, known only as Pierrepont, had laid out a seven-hour schedule of ceremony and work just to hang eleven people. That would have been small potatoes to Kramer; 45,000 had died by torture, starvation and gas in his Belsen concentration camp.

But the Britisher managed to muddle through. Before nightfall in old Hameln town, sacred to the legend of the Pied Piper, he had sent eight men and three women dancing at the end of his ropes.

Blonde and cruel Irma Grese, the strong-jawed beauty of Belsen, was one, and Juana Borman, once a religious missionary, who at Belsen had trained dogs to attack prisoners, was another. Then Kramer was hanged. Through Hameln town ran a rumor that some of Belsen's former inmates had been permitted to watch British justice grind to a sure ending.