COLUMN ONE : Nazi Hunt: Too Late for Justice? : After four decades and 6,500 trials, fewer suspects and witnesses are still alive. A case now in a German court may be the final major one.

With little fanfare, in a courtroom that is usually half empty, one of the final scenes of the Holocaust plays itself out.

Here unfolds what is probably the last major trial of a Nazi war criminal--the end of an era spanning the better part of half a century in which Germans and Jews who survived the chaos of World War II have sifted through the horror of a bygone age in search of justice, meaning and retribution.

The accused, 80-year-old Josef Schwammberger, was no one special in the Nazi hierarchy. His rank of oberscharfuehrer in the SS, Hitler’s elite guard, was equivalent to that of a mere sergeant.

But as the commandant of three Jewish slave labor camps in southeastern Poland between 1941 and 1944, he held unchallenged power. He allegedly used it to execute at least 45 people with his own hands and to participate in the deaths of 3,377 others.

His capture in Argentina five years ago, the payment of a record $310,000 bounty by the German government and his return for trial last year were hailed as a triumph by those who still track Nazi war criminals.

It could be their last.

For along with the descriptions of unbelievable suffering and inhumanity that tumble forth into the court records, a more subtle and unspoken message is also being delivered.

After more than four decades and nearly 6,500 trials, time, quite visibly, is running out on the Nazi hunters.

“There’s the potential for two or three more (important Nazi trials), but we haven’t been able to lay our hands on these people, and I consider it unlikely now,” said Alfred Streim, chief prosecutor in Germany’s Central Office for Nazi Investigations in the city of Ludwigsburg. “Many witnesses are dead, and others want to be left in peace in their old age. Another trial would be very difficult.”

Simon Wiesenthal, head of the Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna and the man most closely associated with the hunt for Nazi criminals, admitted that time is also about to overtake those former Nazis still at large.

Alois Brunner, for example, a key aide to the Holocaust’s chief technocrat, Adolf Eichmann, is now 80, and although he is known to be living in Damascus, no one expects Syria to deliver him soon.

Doubt still surrounds the fate of the infamous concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele, believed to have died in Brazil in 1979. If alive, he would now be 81.

Others are still older.

“Many of those in authority would have been around 40 at the time, and that means they would be 90 today,” he said.

Ironically, time is running out just as the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and recent decisions by both the United Nations and the Argentine government have provided access to long-withheld evidence about war criminals.

Streim’s office, for example, is investigating 800 cases, but the likelihood that any will come to trial is remote.

Wiesenthal said he plans now to shift his focus to finding those in Ukraine and the Baltic states who collaborated with the Nazis in betraying local Jews.

“They are more guilty than the Nazis because they killed their neighbors,” Wiesenthal said. “These people are younger, between 70 and 75 and in good health.”

The Schwammberger trial already labors under the weight of the elapsed years.

The man witnesses describe as a brutal animal who killed Jews at the slightest whim is now a frail, deaf 80-year-old who shuffles slowly when he walks, has trouble following the proceedings and is unlikely to live long after the verdict is delivered.

The trial proceeds slowly because court-appointed physicians have concluded that Schwammberger can take only two two-hour sessions per week.

“It’s hard for me to judge how well he follows it all,” commented deputy defense attorney Dieter Koenig.

Schwammberger’s accusers are also elderly, and--through the fog of five decades and their own infirmities--they frequently confuse the details of events in question.

Last week, a 79-year-old witness collapsed and died in the courtroom shortly after beginning his testimony.

Since the trial opened last June, the court has made four trips to the United States and Canada, as well as traveling to Poland and Israel to hear witnesses either physically or psychologically incapable of appearing in a German courtroom.

Other testimony has come in the form of sworn statements several years old from camp survivors who have since died. Because cross-examination of such witnesses is not possible, the evidence must be handled carefully, court officials said.

“The value of such evidence is limited mainly to that of corroborating other testimony,” said Claus Bergmann, spokesman for the court.

Commented Koenig: “People are doing their best to conduct a fair trial, but it’s difficult. If we applied the strict rules of evidence, as if it were a normal murder case, I think it’s questionable that Schwammberger could be judged at all.”

But, as with those earlier Nazi trials, the Schwammberger proceedings represent no “normal” murder case.

As the commandant of slave labor camps in the southeastern Polish cities of Przemysl, Mielec and Rozvadov, Schwammberger is said to have simply shot those who displeased him at the moment.

One witness testified that Schwammberger, after becoming confused during a count of prisoners, calmly raised his pistol, shot one of them and resumed the count.

Others have told of seeing him kill children by swinging them head-first into a wall or by setting his German shepherd, Prince, upon them to literally tear them apart.

He is also accused of being a key participant in the mass execution of more than 1,000 Jews herded into a gymnasium in Przemysl in September, 1943, and then shot.

“Schwammberger had the function of a god, and he killed whenever he wanted,” testified Stefania Jelenski, a 71-year-old survivor of the Przemysl ghetto.

Briefly captured in 1945 by French forces, Schwammberger confessed to executing 35 people, but he escaped and found his way to Argentina, where he lived until his arrest by Argentine police in November, 1987.

He has since retracted his confession and, during the trial, denied committing any atrocities.

Just as time has taken its toll on the survivors, so too has it affected the trial’s broader public impact in Germany.

In the minds of the third post-World War II generation of western German young people, the Nazi horrors unfolded in a different world in another age. Those faraway events have become almost incomprehensible in the context of the affluent, democratic and stable Germany in which they have been raised.

“It’s hard for a young German to convince himself that this all happened,” commented Birgit Schindelberger-Barrows, who teaches at a kindergarten teachers’ training school in the city. She took about 30 of her students, ages 18 to 20, to sit in on the trial.

“The majority of them were in favor of the trial and angry when they learned of the crimes, but they had trouble understanding why witnesses were not clearer in their testimony,” she said. “The students just couldn’t place themselves there. For them, it was another world; they couldn’t conceive of the circumstances.”

Although some had hoped that the trial, the first of its kind since the reunification of Germany, might also provide insights into the Holocaust for eastern Germans, this has not happened.

Amid the severe social dislocation that dominates the eastern region and publicity about legal cases dealing with the more recent Communist era, the Schwammberger trial has barely been noticed by eastern Germans.

Court spokesman Bergmann, for example, said he could not recall fielding a single question from a journalist representing an east German paper.

“It’s mostly foreign reporters and some west Germans who are interested,” he said.

Despite this lack of impact, those whose lives remain focused on Nazi-era crimes believe that the trial is vital.

“It’s a warning for the murderers of tomorrow that they can never rest,” Wiesenthal said in a telephone interview from his office in Vienna. “That’s the memento, the legacy that we can leave behind for the generations to come.”

Added schoolteacher Schindelberger-Barrows: “Perhaps he will die within a year, but for us Germans, the trial is important. If we let him go, we’ve lost our perspective and our sense of justice. We can’t do that.”