Meyer

Meyer’s order to execute partisans becomes a test of the distance between legal judgment and moral judgment: the evidence presents the executions as cruel, while also explaining why a later legal reassessment would not necessarily have allowed him to be prosecuted.

The Order and the Executions

The partisans were shot on Meyer’s orders at the place where they would fall into a pit. They were not blindfolded; they could see those already killed and hear their comrades being shot before them. Their journey to the place of execution lasted for hours, during which they knew they were going to die. The account emphasizes these circumstances not as incidental details but as part of what made the killings resemble mass shootings in concentration camps.

Legal Reassessment and Its Limit

The expert testimony considers how the Federal Supreme Court might assess Meyer’s conduct in the present day: he would, it argues, be regarded as an accessory to murder. That changed legal characterization does not mean a prosecution would have followed. Meyer’s actions were already subject to the statute of limitations, so jurisprudence and the law would have protected him. The distinction is central: a later court might have described his responsibility differently, but the time bar remained an independent obstacle.

Dispute over Judgment

Richard Mattinger argues that judges cannot decide according to what seems politically correct and that Meyer should not be blamed if he acted correctly by the standards of his time. Caspar Leinen rejects that defense. In his view, the executions were objectively cruel, regardless of whether judges in the 1950s and 1960s might have ruled in Meyer’s favor; if judges would decide differently today, that would indicate progress. Mattinger frames the disagreement as one between belief in the laws and belief in society. Meyer’s significance in this exchange therefore lies not only in the order attributed to him, but in the unresolved contrast between legal protection and the judgment that the conduct was cruel.