Third Reich period

The Third Reich period is both the wartime setting for Hans Meyer’s actions in Genoa and the historical past whose legal consequences shape the novel’s courtroom conflict. Its significance extends beyond the crimes themselves: postwar rules about limitation and criminal responsibility determine whether accusations against Meyer can still be heard, exposing the distance between a case formally closed and a past genuinely accounted for.

Wartime Setting

In Genoa, Meyer takes over a Nazi office and runs it like a business venture. He is tasked with ending strikes in the district because local industries are needed to produce war materiel. The brief account links the machinery of occupation to practical economic demands: the suppression of labor unrest is presented as part of maintaining production for the war.

This wartime context returns through the case concerning the shooting of hostages. During the trial, Dr Sybille Schwan testifies that Meyer met the criteria for a legitimate shooting of hostages. Richard Mattinger uses that conclusion to argue that Meyer could no longer be regarded as a murderer, making the legal interpretation of wartime conduct decisive to the later proceedings.

Postwar Limitation Rules

The novel’s account of the legal aftermath begins with a distinction made in Germany in the years after the Third Reich. From 1960, crimes from that period were generally subject to a statute of limitations, while murder remained prosecutable. That exception did not protect every person whose actions had contributed to murder, because legal terminology treated only the highest Nazi leaders as murderers and classified most others as accessories to murder.

The account identifies the Introductory Act to Administrative Offences as the turning point. Its passage caused conduct that had been treated as accessory to murder to become time-barred, ending the prospect of prosecution for many perpetrators. The result is described in the novel as an amnesty in effect: legal categories and limitation rules could close cases involving officials who had organized mass killings, even as prosecutors were preparing major proceedings against the Reich Security Main Office.

Meyer’s Investigation and the Trial

The consequences of this legal framework reach Meyer’s case. The Stuttgart Public Prosecutor’s Office initiated proceedings after accusations were made against him, and investigators assembled a file. Yet Meyer was neither charged nor convicted. At trial, Mattinger draws attention to that outcome and asks what happened to the proceedings; after Schwan’s testimony, he presents the conclusion that Meyer’s conduct qualified as a legitimate hostage shooting as the decisive answer. The scene shows how a wartime act is reframed through the categories available to postwar law.

Fabrizio Collini’s account, as presented by Caspar Leinen, makes the procedural consequence personal. Collini had identified the man who had his father shot, laid charges, supplied what he knew about the evidence, and trusted the authorities. A year later, he received a single-sheet letter saying that proceedings had been discontinued because the matter was time-barred. The letter turns a broad legal rule into a stark individual experience: the state accepted the complaint and then ended the process without bringing Meyer to trial.

Historical Memory and Accountability

The novel connects the Third Reich period to a later effort to examine institutional responsibility. In January 2012, a few months after the novel’s original German publication, the Federal Minister of Justice appointed a committee to reassess the imprint of the Nazi past on the Ministry of Justice. The novel itself became one of the committee’s points of reference, extending the story’s concern from a single discontinued investigation to the institutions that inherited and administered the law.

Across these layers, the period is not treated as a closed chapter simply because the relevant proceedings have ended. The wartime demands imposed in Genoa, the postwar distinction between murderers and accessories, and the later termination of Meyer’s investigation form a chain in which legal rules determine what can be prosecuted and what remains beyond judgment. The committee’s reassessment signals that formal closure did not settle the question of historical responsibility.