July 5, 1996 from The Week in Germany A Weekly Newsletter of the German Information Center New York Editors: Susan Steiner, David Lazar, Edward Karst Berlin Prosecutors Seek Exoneration for Those Who Opposed Nazis Formal rehabilitation could soon be on the way for a handful of the individuals sentenced to death for their opposition to The Berlin Public Prosecutor's Office announced late last month that it was initiating proceedings to have the 1945 death sentence against theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer revoked. That announcement was followed Wednesday (July 3) by an acknowledgement that, as had been reported in a Berlin daily, it was also seeking rehabilitation of Wilhem Canaris and Hans Oster, two of the figures executed in April 1945 in connection with the failed July 20, 1944 assassination attempt upon Hitler. Decisions on all three cases are expected in the course of the summer. Prosecutors may also seek to rehabilitate Claus Graf Schenk zu Stauffenberg and Hans von Dohnanyi reversed as well. Both were involved in the July 20 plot. The Berlin prosecutors argue in their petition on Bonhoeffer's behalf that the 1945 court proceedings against him were conducted not so much to determine the facts of the case, but rather to give a veneer of legitimacy to the decision to execute him. Bonhoeffer had been imprisoned in 1943 for subversion; in 1945, he was transferred from a Berlin prison to the Buchenwald concentration camp (Thuringia) and shortly thereafter to the one in Flossenbrg (Bavaria), where he was executed on April 9, 1945, one day after being sentenced to death and very shortly before Germany's capitulation and the end of the war on May 8. In acknowledging the rehabilitation efforts now underway for Bonhoeffer, Canaris and Oster, Rudiger Reiff of the Berlin Public Prosecutor's Office noted that "very, very many sentences" that had...
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