Dressed in the scarlet death-cell garb, the seven condemned Nazis waited in Landsberg prison for their midnight appointment with the hangman. The hearses with the empty coffins were ready to take the bodies to home-town cemeteries. Late in the evening the men said goodbye to their wives.
The seven were no ordinary Nazis. Oswald Pohl, onetime boss of all Hitler's concentration camps (4,000,000 died in gas chambers at Auschwitz alone), had ordered the extermination of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto; Paul Blobel, Werner Braune, Otto Ohlendorf and Erich Naumann had supervised the murder of 2,000,000 people, mostly Jews, gypsies and Communist-suspects, in the conquered lands of Eastern Europe; Hans Schmidt was adjutant of Buchenwald; Georg Schallermair had run the mass murder machine at Dachau. They were the most wretched specimens of 28 Nazis condemned by a U.S. war crimes court in 1946 and 1947. The 21 others had been reprieved by U.S. authorities.
A small but vocal lobby had worked hard to reprieve the last seven "men in scarlet"; its efforts were backed by Bonn's Vice Chancellor Franz Blücher, leader of the nationalist German Free Democratic Party, Socialist Leader Dr. Carlo Schmid, and $12,000 of Bonn government funds. Twice the Department of State and the
Defense Department have granted stays of execution, while appeals were being considered in federal courts. But in April, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the case. On May 22, U.S. High Commissioner McCloy turned down a final plea.
Without McCloy's knowledge, Warren Magee, Washington attorney for the seven Nazis, last week played one more card. Going to court in Washington, D.C., he presented Federal District Judge Walter M. Bastian with a new argument: there is no capital punishment under West German law. Judge Bastian, new to the case, decided: "I just don't have the heart to let these men be executed today." The State Department quickly relayed Judge Bastian's stay of execution to Frankfurt. Shortly before midnight the seven Nazis were told they would not hang that night.
Commissioner McCloy, said aides, was "thunderstruck" and "confounded" by the reprieve. Still in the basement death row of Landsberg prison, the seven would now wait for the federal courts to rule on whether Attorney Magee's argument had merit, a procedure which could take months. But Frau Schmidt, relieved of her death watch in a Landsberg hotel, remarked: "Now we must immediately cancel the coffin and the hearse."