Hans Meyer Dossier

The Hans Meyer Dossier is a collection of archival records that changes the stakes of Caspar Leinen’s defense: it gives him documentary grounds to investigate the history of the case and to challenge the account of what happened to the proceedings against Hans Meyer. The papers do not simply recount a wartime shooting. They also record an investigation and its discontinuance, turning dates, reports, and procedural history into evidence that can be tested in court.

Archival Recovery

Leinen finds the records in a government department housed in what locals call the blockhouse, a building that had served as a prison for many years and still retained its prison walls. The department had moved there in 2000. Access to its grounds is prosaic and slightly difficult: Leinen has to repeat his name over an intercom with a loose contact before an automatic buzzer opens the rusty gate. He crosses the courtyard to an unlocked iron door and enters a worn interior of PVC flooring, neon lights, woodchip wallpaper, and aluminium handles. The shabby setting contrasts with the weight of the material stored inside it.

Leinen has little to guide his request, only a name and a country, and expects that the search may come to nothing. Instead, government employees locate what he needs among one and a half million index cards. In the reading room, the result is made tangible as fourteen neatly labelled blue-grey folders stacked on a pale wooden table. The dossier begins, for him, not as a settled explanation but as an unexpectedly substantial body of records he must still learn how to read.

The Work of Reading

At first Leinen hesitates before opening the first folder. Through the window, he can see a schoolboy and his girlfriend laughing, fooling around, and kissing at a bus stop; outside life continues while he stands over yellowed papers. He eventually removes his jacket, sits down, and takes a sheaf of documents from the folder. The pause marks the threshold between finding the archive and entering the history it contains.

He remains in Ludwigsburg for five days, returning to the reading room at eight each morning. The folders rise in a stack as his notes fill page after page and notepad after notepad. He requests so many photocopies that the staff begin to groan. He works through the day without stopping for a break, and his eyes grow red-rimmed. At first the files are difficult for him to understand; gradually, their details become legible and connected. The account describes the papers as coming to life in the large, bare room, and Leinen even dreams about them at night.

The city’s own history accompanies this archival immersion. A travel guide leads Leinen through Ludwigsburg’s successive histories of war: the Württemberg army arrived in 1812 with almost sixteen thousand men fighting for Napoleon, nearly all of whom died in Russia; the Old Württemberg Regiment’s memorial records 128 officers and 4,160 men killed in the First World War. The city was also where the 1940 film Jew Süss was made, because Joseph Süss Oppenheimer had lived there. These details do not explain the dossier’s contents, but they place Leinen’s examination of records about wartime violence within a city whose past is itself marked by war and its representation.

The Record and Its Legal Significance

The file enters the trial as more than a private research discovery. During questioning, Richard Mattinger asks Dr Sybille Schwan whether she knows the Hans Meyer file. She confirms that she does. Mattinger then sets out the wartime episode at issue: in 1944, partisans in Genoa detonate a bomb in a café, killing two German soldiers. He asks whether this constituted an attack under the criteria Schwan has described. The exchange brings the dossier’s historical material into a legal argument about the shooting of partisans and the standards governing it.

Mattinger also establishes that reports of the shooting appeared in three local newspapers. He argues that this publicity meets the basic principles of international law and summarizes Schwan’s earlier criteria as having been satisfied. He then turns from the conditions for the shooting to the later legal response: whether proceedings were brought against Hans Meyer. Schwan confirms that there were proceedings, and Mattinger notes that the Stuttgart Public Prosecutor’s Office investigated and assembled a file, although Meyer was neither charged nor convicted. The dossier thus contains a record not only of the underlying accusations but of official scrutiny that did not result in a prosecution.

The Discontinuance and the Dossier’s Turning Point

Schwan states that the proceedings were discontinued. Mattinger gives the date as 7 July 1969, and Schwan confirms it. The exchange initially presents that date as the answer to what happened to the investigation. Later, Leinen asks when the investigation was discontinued and has Schwan clarify the notice sent to Fabrizio Collini: the office ended the proceedings on 7 July, but Collini received notice on 21 July 1969. The distinction between the date of the decision and the date of notification is a precise documentary fact, not a general inference about the case.

That clarification changes the courtroom’s understanding of the record. The judges had not known the detail, and Mattinger’s face pales when it emerges. The dossier’s dates therefore do more than fill in a chronology: they let Leinen return to a point Mattinger had already put before the court and make the documentary account more exact. The file’s significance lies partly in this capacity to complicate a seemingly closed procedural history without requiring the papers themselves to pronounce a final moral or legal judgment.

From Archive to Defense

After five days of reading, Leinen drives back to Berlin carrying boxes of photocopies. He has lost two kilos. He takes the copies into his chambers, draws the curtains in his apartment, and spends the weekend lying in bed. On Monday he visits Fabrizio Collini in remand prison. Seven hours later, when Leinen leaves, he knows what he must do. The sequence shows the dossier’s consequence without making the papers a substitute for the client: archival research prepares Leinen for a decisive conversation with Collini, after which he understands his next step.

In court, the folders’ work is redistributed across questions, testimony, and dates. A file assembled through an investigation becomes a means of examining why that investigation ended and when Collini learned of its termination. Its physical form—labelled folders, fragile yellowed sheets, photocopies carried back to Berlin—keeps the legal argument tied to documents rather than to an abstract dispute about the past. The dossier matters because it makes the history of the case available for scrutiny, while leaving the meaning of that history to be argued from the record.