Soldiers Who Betrayed Hitler To Be Pardoned

BERLIN — Germany is poised to pardon the very last soldiers who were executed during World War II for betraying the Nazi regime.

But the move, which follows a decades-long national debate, has revived bitter differences of opinion over what remains an acutely sensitive subject.

The men were among 30,000 German soldiers who were sentenced to death during the war for a variety of "crimes" from desertion to espionage. Of those, 16,000 were hanged, shot, garroted, or guillotined by a regime determined to crush the merest hint of insurrection in the ranks.

While the vast majority of convicted soldiers, including deserters, were pardoned under a 2002 law, a few dozen remain with their posthumous reputations tarred.

Now, the German Parliament is debating a bill to rehabilitate them too, after the Justice Ministry examined a report by an historian investigating 70 cases of unpardoned "traitors."

The men were mostly described as Kriegsverrat — traitors in wartime — one of four categories of crime that have so far proved too sensitive for modern-day German politicians to excuse.

The others include the mistreatment of men by an officer, and looting of corpses.