Sixteen-year-old Rudolf Merkel was the
youngest war criminal in the Dachau trials
and, at 19, the youngest inmate of Landsberg
prison. He was tried before the US military
tribunal at Dachau in 1947, along with
14 other German civilians, for the murder
of three American flyers whose planes were
shot down in August 1944 in the vicinity
of Gernsbach, a German village near the
French border. All of the flyers had surrendered,
and according to international law, should
have been treated as Prisoners of War by
the civilians who were at the scene. But
these German villagers were seeking vengeance
because American and British planes had
been bombing civilian targets and killing
innocent people. The British and American
policy of deliberately bombing civilians
was designed to destroy the morale of the
German people and force them to surrender.
An estimated 600,000 German civilians were
killed in the Allied bombing and virtually
every city in Germany suffered bomb damage.
In three separate incidents near Gernsbach
in August 1944, a group of local men brutally
beat a downed American flyer, then deliberately
killed him, and buried the body in the
local cemetery. Merkel was a 16-year-old
farm boy at the time, and like all German
boys his age, a member of the Hitler Youth.
He was 6 months too young to be in the
German Army, and all the others in the
case were too old to fight on the battlefield.
One of the downed pilots had parachuted
to earth and landed on a hill near Merkel's
home in the village of Weisenbach. Merkel
was one of three villagers who found the
wounded pilot under a bush and started
to carry him down the hill. They were interrupted
by another villager, Adolf Eiermann, who
ordered them to beat the pilot, later identified
as Sgt. Robert A. McDonough. According
to testimony at the trial, Merkel was urged
by one of the participants, Hermann Krieg,
to strike the flyer twice with a stick
after the man was most likely already dead.
For their crimes, Merkel was sentenced
by the American military tribunal to hard
labor at Landsberg prison for life, and
Krieg received the death sentence.
When the Gernsbach case came up for review,
three of the 14 convictions were overturned,
and 2 of the death sentences were reduced,
including Krieg's sentence which was reduced
to 10 years. The guilty verdict for Rudolf
Merkel was upheld, but his sentence was
reduced to 15 years at hard labor. In the
opinion of the review counsel, the evidence
against Merkel was sufficient to establish
that "he participated in and acted
in furtherance of the common design embraced
in the particulars of Charge I." However,
the review counsel also said that "Notice
should be taken of this accused's tender
years at the time he committed these offenses."
Note the use of the word "accused," rather
than the usual term "defendant." All
the German war criminals were called "the
accused" because they were presumed
guilty and the burden of proof was upon
them. Note also the use of the plural "offenses" although
Merkel had only struck one of the flyers
and was not even present when the other
two were killed. Under the "common
design" of the charges, all
the accused were guilty in all three incidents
because they were carrying out a common
plan to deliberately kill downed American
pilots. Nevertheless, because of his young
age at the time of his crime, the review
board considered his life sentence at hard
labor to be too harsh.
Merkel hired a German lawyer and petitioned
for clemency. The man who had urged Merkel
to participate in beating the downed flyer,
Hermann Krieg, had been originally sentenced
to death by hanging, but the review board
had reduced his sentence to 10 years in
prison. For some inexplicable reason, the
review board had ruled that Merkel's punishment
should be more severe than Krieg's. Because
of this, Merkel's German lawyer asked for
his client's sentence to be further reduced.
Rudolf Merkel was finally released from
Landsberg prison on September 18, 1951
after his sentence was commuted. He was
23 years old. Krieg was released 5 months
later. Four of the other accused civilians
in the Gernsbach down flyers case were
executed by hanging, including Adolf Eiermann,
the instigator in the beating of McDonough.
All the others were released from prison
within ten years.