Ex-SS Guard Acquitted of ’44 Murder of Red Leader

Amid screams of protest from the public gallery, a West German court today acquitted a former SS guard of the wartime murder of Communist leader Ernst Thaelmann.

As the Duesseldorf high court’s chief judge, Enno Legde, handed down the verdict, people in the gallery shouted, “Nazi murderer!” “Crooked judge!” and “Fire the court!”

Wolfgang Otto was sentenced in 1986 to four years in prison for the 1944 murder of Thaelmann at the Buchenwald concentration camp. The supreme court ordered a retrial in March, 1987, for lack of conclusive evidence.

Otto, 77, who sat impassively during the court session, had been set free before the five-month retrial. A retired schoolteacher, he had earlier admitted taking part in the executions of Polish and Soviet prisoners of war. For this, he received a 20-year sentence in 1945 by a U.S. war crimes tribunal but was freed after serving seven years.

The judge said the evidence, presented in statements by witnesses now dead or ailing, was “contradictory and not credible.” Even the date of the murder, believed to be the night of Aug. 18, 1944, had not been fully established, he said.

As years passed, chances diminished of finding witnesses still able to recall whether Otto was present when Thaelmann was shot dead and his body secretly cremated.

In testimony given earlier, Otto said he was a clerk in the Buchenwald command office where he kept rolls of the names of executed prisoners and their time of death. He also handed out extra rations to execution commandos--”10 cigarettes, a slice of sausage and two glasses of alcohol,” he told the court.

The first trial on Thaelmann’s death took place in the Rhineland town of Krefeld after more than a quarter of a century of campaigning by Thaelmann’s daughter, Irma Gabel-Thaelmann, who now lives in East Berlin.