The Quiet Death of a Nazi: Martin Sandberger's Last, and Only, Interview

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It has become quiet in the Stuttgart retirement home. Dusk is falling, and Sandberger is mulling things over. Was his death penalty deserved? He says he would rather "not comment" on that, and that he prefers to talk about his life after the war. He wore the red jacket of death-row inmates, like all the other prisoners at Landsberg Prison, where Hitler wrote Mein Kampf. But he was released in 1951. While five of his fellow prisoners were hung in the prison yard, Sandberger found a soft landing in postwar Germany.

Two brothers helped him after he was released: Eberhard Müller, a theologian and head of the Evangelical Academy, and his brother Bernhard, a member of the state parliament for the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), and later the party's liaison to the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD). Most of all, however, Bernhard Müller was the general agent of the Lechler group of companies.

"I prayed that God would send you to me." These were the words with which he was received by the head of the company at the time, says Sandberger. Hired as a legal advisor in 1958, he single-mindedly worked his way up to become the "right hand man and highly respected member" of management, as Walter H. Lechler, the current managing director, says today.

According to Lechler, the SS veteran apparently expanded his "knowledge of tax law considerably" during his imprisonment at Landsberg. However, as Lechler claims, Sandberger provided no details about his experiences during the war, and nothing was known about ongoing cases against him.

Based on the documents available in archives, this is hard to imagine. On the one hand, Sandberger had a few circumstances in his favor. Starting in 1966, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, a Württemberg native and a member of the Nazi Party after 1933, served as Germany's chancellor in Bonn. And Hans Filbinger, a retired Nazi naval judge, was governor of Baden-Württemberg. On the other hand, courts in southwestern Germany were not idle, as Sandberger would realize.

'Finally Terminated'

The tight-lipped legal advisor at Lechler was called to testify in a further "Einsatzgruppen trial" at Ulm in 1958, and, after 1960, before the Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg. Finally, the Stuttgart public prosecutor's office initiated investigation proceedings against him in May 1970. The proceedings revolved around the "shooting of Jews, communists and paratroopers in Estonia," the execution of an officer who had fired at a portrait of Hitler while intoxicated, and the murder of "1,400-1,500 Jews in Kalevi-Liiva" in the fall of 1942.

Soon, under the eyes of the prosecution, the health of the previously vigorous SS veteran deteriorated. Sandberger's attorney wrote in a letter to prosecutors that his client's abnormally high blood pressure, his near-blindness and the constant risk of a stroke had to be taken into account. The attorney, Fritz Steinacker, a former bomber pilot, is still considered an éminence grise in relevant right-wing circles. He defended the former concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele and the camp pharmacist at Auschwitz, Victor Capesius. He also represents the interests of Aribert Heim, known as "Dr. Death," a Nazi war criminal who may be still at large, despite recent reports of his death.

The Sandberger case is relatively straightforward by comparison. Under the so-called "Transition Agreement" between the occupying powers and Germany, it was sufficient to demonstrate that the SS colonel had already been summarily sentenced by the Americans in 1948 for the crimes the Stuttgart prosecutors were seeking to prove 23 years later. Steinacker succeeded. An indictment for the murder of Jews from Frankfurt and others transferred from the Theresienstadt concentration camp was also unsuccessful when the Stuttgart public prosecutor's office declared, in a letter dated July 13, 1972, that investigations against the defendant Sandberger had been "finally terminated" by the US military tribunal based on the state of affairs.

The phrase was like a deep sigh.

When, in the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War and the opening of archives in Eastern Europe, the first historians started to focus on Sandberger again, he kept a low profile. He spoke with no one and stayed put. There were reports from the Estonian capital Tallinn that "the biggest Nazi in Estonia" and "ambassador of death" was still alive. In late 2009, French bloggers speculated that Sandberger had been traced to a retirement home in Bavaria.

In Germany, on the other hand, there was silence until recently. Plenty of documents had come to light containing material for a possible new indictment, but no one wanted to stir up the case.

So does Sandberger feel ashamed, after all those years, with own death imminent?

The old man in the armchair, the last remaining ringleader in the biggest genocide in history, remains silent for a long time, as he seems to wrestle with himself. Then he says: "I don't want to talk about it."

It's his last word.

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• Part 1: Martin Sandberger's Last, and Only, Interview
• Part 2: Well-Documented Executions
• Part 3: Friends in High Places
• Part 4: A Post-War Legal Advisor