West Germany: The Auschwitz Business

The biggest murder trial in West German history was under way last week in a stark, high-ceilinged auditorium in Frankfurt's Town Hall. Behind six rows of wooden desks sat the 22 defendants, who looked like an ordinary cross section of West German citizens. Indeed they were: facing the court were dentists and businessmen, a farmer, a salesman, a pharmacist. What set them apart was that they were once custodians of that death factory called Auschwitz, the concentration camp where Hitler's men killed Jews, gypsies, Poles and Russians at the rate of up to 9,000 a day during World War...