Herr Doktor

"I cannot listen endlessly to your talk of Jewish rites," said Judge Josef Mulzer, onetime Nazi, in the Bavarian State Court. The man before the court last April, under indictment for fraud and embezzlement, was Philipp Auerbach, f ormer head of the Jewish restitution office in Bavaria. The defense was protesting the court's decision to begin Auerbach's trial at Passover. It was like that throughout, a trial that stirred old enmities and tense feelings in Germany. It was the first big trial of a Jew before a German court since the war.

After the Nazis seized his father's business in 1934, Auerbach had fled the country, but in 1940 the Vichy French turned him over to the Gestapo. Auerbach was sent from one concentration camp to another, finally to Buchenwald. His school knowledge of chemistry saved him from the gas chambers: he became the prison pest exterminator. The prisoners called him Herr Doktor. He survived, but the Nazis killed 21 of his relatives.

After the war he began working among the survivors of Naziism. When Bavaria, under U.S. pressure, passed a law to indemnify these survivors, Auerbach was appointed to distribute the funds. All went well until the Germans became suspicious of how Auerbach was spending the money. Methodically, they went to work collecting evidence, finally nailed him with a 102-page indictment which charged him with extortion, swearing to false affidavits, and the unauthorized use of the title Herr Doktor, but chiefly with having paid out to Jews 3,000,000 marks in false claims. Named with him was Aaron Ohrenstein, chief rabbi of Bavaria.

Auerbach denied everything, except having used the title Herr Doktor. for which, since his concentration-camp days, he admitted a certain fondness. Last week the court (three out of the five judges were former Nazis) found against Avie:"bach and Ohrenstein. sentenced Auerbach to 30 months in jail and $643 in fines, Ohrenstein to one year and $2,380 in fines. Auerbach, his arm in a sling, sick with diabetes contracted during his concentration-camp days, politely thanked the court, complimented the chief judge for the fairness of the trial, though he was somewhat critical of the "terror verdict." and went back to the drab little clinic where he had been held during the trial's four months. He wrote to his wife saying that he could not endure the shame of conviction. That evening he chewed up a handful of sleeping tablets and quietly died.

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