Medicine Hat railway station in the early 20th century.
On 5 March 1946, 16-year-old Joyce Reesor played truant from her high school in Medicine Hat, Alberta –to watch the end of what would ultimately be six of the most unique trials in Canadian history. In each, a German POW, some former Afrika Korpsman others who had belonged to Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe, stood on trial for his life for the killing of two other POWs, one in 1943 and one in 1944. The denouement of Rex v. Werner Schwalb that Reesor witnessed – Judge Howson’s saying of the ancient words, “and shall be hanged by the neck until you are dead, and may the Lord have mercy on your soul”–was hardly a surprise. Hamstrung by the lack of character witnesses, defence attorney Louis S. Turcotte declined to mount a defence, and had been reduced to sniping at the case presented by Alberta’s deputy attorney journal, H. H. Wilson, QC, who appointed himself crown prosecutor.
Turcotte landed a few blows, successfully arguing on the first day for the case against the three POWs accused of killing Private August Plaszek in 1943 to be split into separate trials. He forced the pre-war lawyer Hans Schnorrenpfeil to growl “Nein” when pressed on his previous statement that he had actually seen the men secreted behind a screen in a POW hut whose job it was to take down the testimony of men being interrogated for treason against Germany. He led the court through a mind-numbing excursus on whether Boden meant clay or earth, which Howson ended by declaring, “ ‘clay’ is earth and earth is ‘clay’ ” and Plaszek was struck in the head by a large clod wielded by a POW.
Camp 132
But in the end the six men on the jury believed the story that began with around 5 p.m. on July 22, 1943, Private Reginald Back of the Veterans Guard saw a man waving a white cloth and running toward the warning wire of Camp 132. But no soccer ball had bounced out of bounds. No one was playing soccer when Back looked down from his perch in Tower No. 7. Rather, he saw that the man waving the white cloth was being chased by hundreds of angry, shouting inmates. Once the desperate POW crossed the warning wire, his pursuers halted, knowing that without white flags they risked being shot. To ensure that the mob respected the boundary, Back ostentatiously aimed his rifle.
From their vantage points on Towers 7 and 4 respectively, Back and Sergeant Frederic C. Byers struggled to make out which of the prisoners was being dragged backward away from them, and the faces of the two men who were doing the dragging.
The tower guards could see Plaszek being taken toward the west recreation hall. Back called the guard room asking for scouts to return to the enclosure, make their way to the recreation hall and free the man. Byers also called the guard room with the same request. In an effort to deter the four men manhandling Plaszek, Back called the sentries in Tower No. 6 and ordered them to fire shots over the men’s heads, but for reasons unknown, the men in this tower did not follow Back’s orders. After ten minutes, with no sign of the scouts re-entering the enclosure, Back called the guard room again. By this time, he “felt the man would be dead because of the delay.”
The first senior POW to hear of what happened to Plaszek after he was dragged to the recreation hall appears to have been Dr. Nolte, who saw “a body hanging by the west wall.” The rope had been passed around the victim’s neck twice and drawn so tight it cut into his flesh by about an inch. After pushing his way through the crowd, Nolte felt for a pulse but “found no sign of life” and ordered Plaszek’s body to be cut down.
Plaszek’s body was a horrible sight. Said Royal Army Medical Korps Captain W. F. Hall: “[The] face of the deceased was very swollen—the tongue was sticking out slightly and there was blood from the nostrils and mouth and also from the back of the head.”
*****
As would be true during their investigation of the killing of Dr. Karl Lehmann on DATE, the RCMP and Military Intelligence faced something approaching a wall of silence enforced by the camp Gestapo; when the cases were broken after Germany’s surrender in May 1945, Canadian authorities discovered that Lehmann’s murder had been ordered by the Gestapo. Slowly, however, POWs came forward and the RCMP charged men with Plaszek’s murder and the four men charged with killing Lehmann. One of the key pieces of evidence against Adolf Kratz was his swagger: another was boast after the killing, as he ate a hard-boiled egg “The egg tastes that much better because I have helped hang a traitor.” Lehmann’s killers had each signed a confession, which provided little more than a tied ribbon at the end of the story of the bloody killing of a fellow Afrika Korpsman.
*****
In the end, for killing Plaszek, one man was found innocent and two guilty, this second being Schulz. Just before the trap door opened and his body fell, he called out, “My Fuhrer, I follow thee.” The four men charged with killing Lehmann were hanged on 18 December 1946, the last mass hanging in Canadian history.
Today
Now an appellate court would almost certainly declare each of these trails a mistrial. We need look no further than the contentious use of evidence of homosexuality by both the Crown and the defense, each an POWs sexual past in an attempt to shake the jury’s belief in the evidence he presented: perhaps the most egregious statement being “Let us step a little deeper into the mire” in defense attorney Rice’s questioning of Wilhelm Wendt, who had been camp 132’s Man of Confidence, i.e., the leader of the POWs and, secretly, a lead Nazi.
Even in the context of 1946, the trials and their outcome are highly debatable. As was argued in detail in the appeal of the convictions for killing Lehmann, the trials took place in the wrong venue. Both the War Measures Act and the Geneva Convention called for such important charges to be adjudged in military –not civilian – court.
Notwithstanding Judge Howson’s statement from the bench, “I am of the opinion that the land comprised in the Prisoner of War Camp, No. 132, at Medicine Hat, is part of the Dominion of Canada,” things were not the clear cut. Under the Geneva Convention, prisoners of war remain under the military law of their home army, which is why the Convention recognizes the right of a POW to try to escape when his home army makes that a duty, as both the German and British military codes did. The Convention also recognized that, for example, in the case of POW Camp 132, German military law prevailed within the wire. Accordingly, once, following the failure of the Bomb Plot in 1944 Hitler gave the order to liquidate traitors, German soldiers in Canada had reason to consider themselves bound to do so: Lehmann was suspected of treason (and, in fact, did give Canadian authorities information). Indeed, in a similar case in South Africa, the judge ruled against the death penalty saying that the German POWs feared for their lives if they did not carry out the orders of their camp’s Gestapo.
