Dreher’s law

Dreher’s law is the novel’s shorthand for the far-reaching effects of the Introductory Act to Administrative Offences, which came into force on 1 October 1968. An apparently minor change in the timing and classification of limitation rules helped make certain accessories to murder no longer prosecutable. Its importance emerges in the trial of Fabrizio Collini: the proceedings against Hans Meyer had not resolved whether he was guilty or innocent, but were discontinued because the law had placed the alleged crimes beyond prosecution. The act thus makes a technical legal change carry the weight of an unresolved historical reckoning.

The legal change

The background to the act was a shift in the treatment of crimes committed during the Third Reich. From 1960, those crimes were subject to a statute of limitations, with murder excepted and still open to prosecution. The 1968 act altered the calculation of limitation periods. As the expert witness explains in court, the resulting change meant that certain accessories to murder were sentenced under the category of accessories to manslaughter instead. Since the relevant limitation period had expired, their acts could no longer be prosecuted.

The account does not describe the act as an explicit amnesty. Rather, its practical effect was amnesty-like: people whose roles in murder and mass killing might otherwise have been prosecuted could no longer be called to account. The law’s force lay in the interaction between legal classification and elapsed time. A change in how an accessory’s conduct was categorized could transform a case that remained prosecutable into one barred by limitation, without a new finding about what had happened or who had been responsible.

A technical measure with historical consequences

The act appeared so inconspicuous that it was not debated in the German Bundestag, and the parliamentary deputies did not recognize what its provisions would mean. The legal administration departments of the eleven Federal states, the parliamentary deputies, and the legal committees all failed to identify the consequence described in the testimony. Only the press exposed the problem; by the time it became widely understood, the limitation effect had already taken hold.

That consequence collided with preparations in Berlin for major proceedings against the head office of Reich Security. The act meant that prosecutors could no longer bring to account officials connected with massacres in Poland and the Soviet Union, including men responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews, priests, communists, and gypsies. In the expert’s account, the change therefore reached well beyond an individual case: a seemingly technical revision shut down the prospect of prosecuting a broad class of perpetrators and accessories.

The testimony identifies Dr Eduard Dreher as the figure behind the act. His earlier career makes the attribution especially troubling: during the Third Reich he was Head Public Prosecutor at the Innsbruck Special Court, where he sought a death sentence for a man who had stolen food and considered a thirteen-year prison sentence insufficient for a woman who had illegally bought clothing coupons, calling for her transfer to a Workers’ Educational Camp. The account supplies this record but does not establish that Dreher deliberately designed the 1968 change to protect former Nazi perpetrators. It leaves the question of intent unresolved.

The Meyer proceedings

The trial makes the statute’s operation concrete through the case of Hans Meyer. The Stuttgart Public Prosecutor’s Office had initiated proceedings against him over accusations concerning the shooting of hostages. There had been investigations and a file, but Meyer was neither charged nor convicted; the expert witness also confirms that he was not questioned. When Richard Mattinger emphasizes that the proceedings were discontinued, his questioning encourages the courtroom to infer that Meyer had been cleared.

Caspar Leinen challenges that impression. The shooting had taken place, Meyer had been in command, and the proceedings ended because the statute of limitations had come into force. The Stuttgart Public Prosecutor’s Office discontinued its investigations on 7 July 1969. The distinction is decisive: discontinuation did not amount to a determination of Meyer’s guilt or innocence. The expert witness confirms that no further investigation of that question followed.

For Fabrizio Collini, the procedural outcome followed his attempt to seek an official response. He had given the authorities the name of the man who had his father shot, laid charges, and identified the evidence. A year later, he received a single-sheet letter saying that proceedings had been discontinued because of the limitation rule. The law therefore appears not as an abstract doctrine but as the explanation for why a complaint could be made, investigated, and then closed without a judgment on the accused man’s responsibility.

Reversal, accountability, and legacy

When asked why the law could not simply be repealed, the expert invokes a basic principle of a constitutional state founded on the rule of law: once a criminal offence has become subject to a statute of limitations, that ruling cannot be reversed. That principle makes the consequence durable. The novel holds together two uncomfortable facts: the change obstructed accountability for grave historical crimes, while the legal order’s own commitment to predictability barred a later reversal of the expired limitation period.

Dreher himself was not called to account. The testimony states that it could not be proved beyond all doubt that he had not simply made a mistake; he died in 1996, highly esteemed. His place in the legal establishment sharpened the irony: he had co-authored the Dreher/Tröndle commentary, a widely used criminal-law commentary found on the desks of judges, prosecutors, and defense counsel. The episode connects the act’s consequences to a broader problem of institutional memory without resolving the question of Dreher’s personal intent.

The law’s afterlife extends beyond the courtroom. In January 2012, a few months after the novel’s original German publication, the Federal Minister of Justice appointed a committee to reappraise the Ministry’s legacy from the Nazi past; the novel itself became one of the committee’s points of reference. Dreher’s law thus functions both as a plot mechanism in the Meyer proceedings and as a way of asking how legal systems remember, classify, and sometimes foreclose the pursuit of historical responsibility.