Decent Burial

The grisliest petty tyrants in history were in all likelihood the men and women who ran Germany's infamous concentration and extermination camps for the greater glory of Hitler's Nazi Reich. Within three years after V-E day, 91 of them were tried for a deluge of crimes—in some cases up to 1,000 murders apiece —and then were hanged in the courtyard of Lower Saxony's yellow-walled Hameln prison. They were buried on the spot in plain coffins in a common unmarked grave. Most were ex-warders from nightmarish Belsen, including suet-faced ex-Commandant Joseph Kramer, the "Beast of Belsen," and his 21-year-old girl assistant Irma Grese, whose particular hobby consisted of turning her fierce dogs loose on Belsen's helpless inmates.

Few Germans have shed public tears over the passing of Kramer & Co. But since 1950, when the British turned Hameln prison back to the West German Federal Republic, there has been continuous pressure to give the Belsen criminals a "decent burial." "Don't forget," snapped one German, "80% of those people were innocent."

Last week, as quietly as possible, the government of Lower Saxony bowed to the demands, dug the corpses out of the prison yard, repacked each in a small box and reburied them in Hameln's municipal cemetery. "Relatives wanted to visit the graves, and we couldn't have all those strangers stomping through our jail," an official apologized. "At last," crowed Hannover's Allgemeine Zeitung, "they have found worthy resting places."