1950s and 1960s

The 1950s and 1960s are the period in which postwar German legal rules and attitudes toward Nazi crimes shaped the fate of an investigation into Hans Meyer. In the trial of Fabrizio Collini, the period matters not simply as historical background: its legislation and prosecutorial decisions explain why a complaint identifying Meyer did not lead to a trial, and why later judgments of his actions could not undo that outcome.

A changing legal framework

The legal position shifted over the course of the period. By 1960, crimes from the Third Reich were generally subject to a statute of limitations, while murder remained prosecutable. That distinction left open the possibility of pursuing murder cases even as other crimes from the era were becoming time-barred.

On 1 October 1968, the Introductory Act to Administrative Offences came into force. In the account given during Collini’s trial, this apparently technical law altered how the limitation period was calculated and changed the classification of certain accessories to murder: they could be sentenced as accessories to manslaughter instead. As a result, acts that had been prosecutable could suddenly be beyond prosecution. The change passed without debate in the German Bundestag, and its effect was not recognized by the legal administration departments of the eleven Federal states, parliamentary deputies, or legal committees until the press exposed the problem.

The law’s consequences could not simply be reversed once they were recognized. The expert witness explains that, in a constitutional state governed by the rule of law, an offense that has become subject to a statute of limitations cannot later be made prosecutable again. The legal principle therefore preserved the effect of the 1968 change even after its implications became clear.

The Meyer investigation and its closure

The consequences appear in the proceedings concerning Meyer. The Stuttgart Public Prosecutor’s Office initiated an investigation after Fabrizio Collini named the man responsible for having his father shot, provided what evidence he had, and trusted the authorities to act. The investigation produced a file, but Meyer was never questioned, charged, or convicted. On 7 July 1969, the office discontinued its investigation.

At Collini’s trial, the date and reason for that decision turn a legal history into a personal one. Collini received a single sheet of paper stating that the proceedings had been discontinued because the relevant conduct was subject to a statute of limitations under the law that had taken effect on 1 October 1968. The investigation had formally existed, but it had not resolved Meyer’s guilt or innocence. When the discontinuance was confirmed in court, Collini sat with his head bowed and tears falling; the legal outcome had not settled the question that his complaint had raised.

Standards of judgment

The trial also sets the legal standards of the 1950s and 1960s against later historical judgment. The expert witness describes how Meyer’s orders led partisans to be shot at the edge of a pit, where they would see those already killed and hear their comrades being shot. She says the Federal Supreme Court would judge the conduct differently today and regard Meyer as an accessory to murder. Yet she also makes clear that the change in judgment could not overcome the expired limitation period: jurisprudence and the law would still have protected him.

Richard Mattinger argues that judges cannot condemn Meyer by applying what seems politically correct in a later era; if Meyer acted correctly by the standards of his own time, Mattinger says, he cannot be blamed for it today. Caspar Leinen rejects that defense. In his view, the act was objectively cruel, and the fact that courts in the 1950s and 1960s might have ruled in Meyer’s favor does not alter its character. A different judgment in the present, he argues, would indicate progress. Their disagreement makes the period more than a date range: it is the contested measure against which law, responsibility, and changing social judgment are weighed.

Retrospective reckoning

The novel places the legal closure of the 1960s alongside a later shift in public understanding. The Auschwitz Trials of 1963–1965 confronted much of the population with the horror of the past, while a broader change in public mood came only toward the end of the 1970s, when the American television series Holocaust reached millions of viewers in Germany. The contrast underscores that legal rules and public judgment did not change at the same pace.

The period’s institutional legacy also extends beyond the events of the trial. In January 2012, the Federal Minister of Justice appointed a committee to reassess the mark left on the Ministry of Justice by its Nazi past; the novel itself became one of the committee’s points of reference. That later inquiry does not undo the 1969 discontinuance, but it places the dispute over the 1950s and 1960s within an ongoing examination of how law can close a case while leaving historical responsibility unresolved.