1968 Amendment to Section 50 of the Criminal Code

The 1968 Amendment to Section 50 of the Criminal Code altered the sentencing rules for accessories to crimes, with consequences that reached beyond the wording of the statute: under the interpretation presented at trial, it helped make certain accessories to murder no longer prosecutable once the limitation period expired. Its importance in the novel lies in the distance between a case being closed and responsibility being judged. The proceedings against Hans Meyer were discontinued, but that outcome did not establish his innocence; it followed from a change in the law that had foreclosed further prosecution.

The statutory change

Until 30 September 1968, Section 50 of the Federal German Criminal Code provided that each person participating in a crime committed a punishable offence, regardless of the guilt of others. It also stated that special personal qualities or circumstances calling for a harsher or more lenient penalty, or excluding a penalty, applied only to the relevant offender or accessory. The provision thus distinguished the participant’s liability from special characteristics affecting another person’s punishment.

Clause 1, No. 6 of the Introductory Act to Administrative Offences came into force on 1 October 1968 and revised that framework. The general rule on participants remained, but a new clause addressed an accessory who did not possess the special distinguishing features that formed the basis of the perpetrator’s criminal liability. In that situation, the accessory’s penalty was to be mitigated according to the rules for an attempted crime. The text retained a further clause assigning the effect of special features to the offender or accessory concerned. The change was therefore expressed as a sentencing provision, but its practical significance depended on how the altered classification interacted with limitation periods.

How the amendment affected prosecution

At the Collini murder trial, Dr Sybille Schwan explained that the amendment changed the timing of the statute of limitations. She described the result in concrete terms: certain accessories to murder would now be sentenced as accessories to manslaughter instead. With that altered classification, conduct that had remained prosecutable could become time-barred. In her account, the change meant that some alleged killers could no longer be prosecuted, not that a court had examined the evidence and found them innocent.

The explanation also placed the change within a wider administrative failure. According to Dr Sybille Schwan, the legal administration departments of the eleven Federal states, members of the German Bundestag, and legal committees did not notice the effect. The press exposed the problem; by the time its consequences were understood, it was too late to restore prosecution in cases already subject to the limitation rule. Schwan emphasized a basic constraint of a constitutional state: once an offence has become subject to a statute of limitations, that ruling cannot be reversed. The legal certainty protected by the rule thus also made the consequences of the amendment difficult to undo.

The Meyer proceedings in court

The amendment’s practical effect becomes personal through the case against Hans Meyer. The Stuttgart Public Prosecutor’s Office had initiated proceedings following accusations against him, and an investigation and file existed. Yet Meyer was neither charged nor convicted. During questioning, Richard Mattinger established that the proceedings had been discontinued, and stated that the Stuttgart office dropped its investigation on 7 July 1969. That fact initially gave the courtroom the impression that Meyer had been cleared.

Caspar Leinen challenged that impression. Dr Sybille Schwan clarified that the shooting had taken place and that Hans Meyer had been in command; the investigation was discontinued because the statute of limitations had come into force. She confirmed that the relevant law took effect on 1 October 1968. Leinen then drew out what the procedural history meant for his client, Fabrizio Collini: Collini had reported the name of the man who had his father shot, laid charges, and provided what evidence he had. About a year later, he received a letter stating that proceedings had been discontinued because the matter was now time-barred. The amendment had not produced a verdict on Meyer’s guilt or innocence. It had prevented that question from being decided in a prosecution.

Historical and narrative significance

Schwan connected the amendment to the law associated with Dr Eduard Dreher, describing the resulting change as an amnesty for a broad group of people. She pointed to the contrast between the limitation effect and preparations in Berlin for major proceedings against the head office of Reich Security. As she explained it, the change obstructed efforts to bring officials responsible for mass killings to account. The novel thereby presents a technical revision to a criminal-code provision as a mechanism with far-reaching consequences: a small change in the treatment of accessories could close off cases involving grave historical crimes.

The trial scene turns on a distinction that legal procedure can easily blur. Mattinger’s questions establish that the investigation ended; Leinen’s questioning establishes why. The first fact can sound like exoneration, while the second reveals a legal bar rather than a judgment on the evidence. The amendment consequently bears on both the rule of law and the limits of accountability: the prohibition on reviving time-barred offences protects legal certainty, yet in these cases it also leaves accusations unresolved.

The law’s legacy extends beyond the courtroom in the novel. In January 2012, a few months after the novel’s original German publication, the Federal Minister of Justice appointed a committee to reassess the mark left on the Ministry of Justice by the Nazi past; the novel itself served as one point of reference. That later attention underscores the amendment’s significance as more than a technical historical detail. Its operation shaped what could be prosecuted, while the novel’s trial exposes the difference between the administrative closure of a case and a reckoning with the conduct at its center.