Cheating Justice

In his drive to preserve the Aryan race, Adolf Hitler did not stop with the extermination of the Jews. In 1940, Hitler appointed Dr. Werner Heyde, a pale, bespectacled SS major and former Wiirzburg University Medicine lecturer, supervisor of "Operation Mercy Killing." Until courageous protests from German church leaders forced the Nazis to curtail the program in 1941, Heyde and a staff of "selectors" in his euthanasia task force killed more than 100,000 mental defectives, including many who were only senile or epileptic.

After the war, Heyde was interned by the Allies but escaped to the north German state of Schleswig-Holstein, where, as "Dr. Fritz Sawade," he established a flourishing practice. Though many ranking Schleswig-Holstein officials were aware of Sawade's real identity, he was never taken into custody; over the years the doctor collected some $75,000 in fees as an expert medical witness before the state's courts. At last, in 1959 Sawade was unmasked as Heyde and thrown into jail.

For four years, the state assembled 84,000 pages of incriminating documents and laboriously prepared a 900-page indictment against Heyde and a group of his former associates, including Friedrich Tillmann, 60, onetime director of a Cologne orphanage. Last week, seven days before they were scheduled to go on trial, Tillmann plunged to his death from a nine-story window in Cologne. Next day, Heyde, 61, looped a belt over a radiator in his jail cell and hanged himself.

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