West Germany: Judgment at Bonn

The case is unusual in that the defendants are charged with crimes committed in the name of the law. The defendants served as judges. They distorted, they perverted, they destroyed justice and law.

With those words, the prosecution opened the case against the accused judges in the film Judgment at Nuremberg. Last week, the West German government enacted its own version of the movie.

In order to protect the judiciary from political pressure, the West German constitution specifies that judges must be appointed for life. In practice, the 1949 law has revealed a damaging defect: of the country's 11,600 judges, about 100 turned out to have sat on Nazi criminal courts. Growing increasingly sensitive to the presence of even the small number of tainted judges, Bonn's Bundestag in June 1961 unanimously passed a law offering full pensions to these judges if they voluntarily retired within a year. If they refused, the government would seek a constitutional amendment to remove them, cancel their pension rights and put them to trial.

Last week, as the one-year deadline arrived, 143 judges and prosecutors quit; only 14 stubbornly refused. To remove even this remnant, the government still plans its constitutional amendment.