Fabrizio Collini’s complaint against Hans Meyer and termination of the investigation

Fabrizio Collini’s complaint against Hans Meyer, and the termination of the resulting investigation, expose the distance between a case being closed and responsibility being examined. In the courtroom, the discontinuance is first presented as though it followed from the legality of a wartime shooting. Caspar Leinen’s questions overturn that account: Collini had named the man who ordered his father’s death, but the Stuttgart Public Prosecutor’s Office ended its investigation because the statute of limitations had come into force, not because it had resolved Meyer’s guilt or innocence.

The complaint and the investigation

During Richard Mattinger’s questioning of Dr Sybille Schwan, the court hears that the Stuttgart Public Prosecutor’s Office investigated Hans Meyer from 1968 to 1969. The investigation concerned accusations connected to the shooting of partisans. The file included reports of the shooting from three local newspapers, a detail Mattinger invokes while arguing that the basic principles of international law had been satisfied. That evidence becomes part of his case that the shooting could be considered legitimate.

The existence of an investigation, however, did not mean that Meyer was tried. Schwan confirms that he was not found guilty and, when asked, that he was not even questioned. Mattinger draws attention to this absence of prosecution and conviction, then asks what happened to the proceedings. Schwan says they were discontinued. The Stuttgart Public Prosecutor’s Office dropped the investigation on 7 July 1969.

The date matters because the action was not an adjudication after a hearing of Meyer’s account. The proceedings ended without Meyer being questioned, charged, or found guilty. At this point in the exchange, Mattinger uses the lack of a conviction alongside his argument about the legal criteria for the shooting. His conclusion to the court is that Meyer can no longer be regarded as a murderer. The account has made a procedural ending appear to settle a question of historical and moral responsibility.

Leinen identifies the complainant

After the lunch adjournment, Leinen interrupts the apparent conclusion and resumes questioning Schwan. His manner has changed: the softness in his voice is gone. He asks who laid charges against Meyer. Schwan names Collini, a fact that surprises one of the judges and visibly unsettles Mattinger. The disclosure changes the meaning of the old investigation. Collini was not merely the defendant in a present-day murder trial; years earlier, he had gone to the authorities with an accusation against the man who had his father shot.

Leinen then establishes the chronology of the discontinuance. The Stuttgart Public Prosecutor’s Office ended its investigation on 7 July 1969, and Collini received notice of that decision on 21 July. Schwan confirms that this is the same discontinuance Mattinger had raised before the adjournment. Leinen tests the inference his opponent has invited the court to draw: he asks whether the investigation was dropped because the shooting of the partisans was legitimate. Schwan answers no.

That answer separates two propositions the earlier questioning had allowed to run together. Mattinger had discussed whether the shooting met criteria for a legitimate hostage execution; that was not the reason the investigation ended. Asked why it was discontinued, Schwan explains that the statute of limitations had come into force. She confirms that the limitation followed from a law that took effect on 1 October 1968. The date places the new legal rule before the investigation’s closure and gives the courtroom a different explanation for why the authorities stopped pursuing the case.

A case closed without a finding

Leinen restates what the chronology means for Collini’s part in the proceedings: he identified the man who had his father shot, made a complaint, provided what he knew, and trusted the authorities to act. The response, as Leinen presents it, was a notice that the case had been discontinued because the events were now subject to a limitation period. Schwan confirms the central point. The investigation did not proceed to a later inquiry into Meyer’s guilt or innocence; its termination rested on the time bar.

The distinction is consequential but narrow. The record described in court establishes that an investigation existed, that Collini had brought the accusation, that Meyer was never questioned, and that the file was closed under the law in force. It does not establish that a court found Meyer innocent, nor does the discontinuance itself decide whether the shooting was lawful. Leinen’s questioning restores those limits after Mattinger’s presentation has made the absence of a conviction sound like a substantive vindication.

The courtroom reacts to the revelation in ways that register its force. A judge raises his head when Collini is identified as the complainant; Mattinger pales; and the journalists take out their notebooks and begin writing again. Earlier, after Mattinger had announced that he had no further questions, Leinen had turned to Collini and seen him bowed over, his hands heavy in his lap and tears falling. The investigation’s history is therefore not an abstract technicality for the defendant. The record links his earlier attempt to obtain an official inquiry with a decision that arrived by notice rather than through a finding on the accusation.

Aftermath and significance

The scene turns on the difference between a legal termination and an answer. The Stuttgart Public Prosecutor’s Office did stop investigating Hans Meyer, but the reason established by Schwan is the limitation rule, not a decision that the alleged shooting was legitimate. Leinen’s challenge does not produce a new verdict on Meyer. Instead, it forces the court to see what the old proceedings did and did not determine—and to recognize Collini as the person who had first brought the accusation to the authorities.

The episode also connects the individual case to the later reassessment of institutional history. In January 2012, a few months after the novel’s original German publication, the Federal Minister of Justice appointed a committee to reappraise the mark left on the Ministry of Justice by the Nazi past; the novel was among its points of reference. That later fact does not alter the legal outcome of the investigation, but it underscores why the distinction exposed in court matters beyond the two men. A file can be closed by a rule of law while leaving unanswered the question of what justice requires when that rule prevents historical responsibility from being tested.