The Naumann Tangle
It is necessary to try to understand why the Foreign Office should have put itself so completely in the-wrong as it seems to have done over the refusal to grant the British and German counsel of the arrested neo-Nazi Werner Naumann access to their imprisoned client in connection with the appeal he has lodged under habeas corpus. Such an action runs clean counter to all British ideas of juristic procedure, and it is parti- cularly unfortunate that so tempting a target should be offered to German critics of the Allied Occupation. The apparent expIanation—no full explanation has been given—is that the Foreign Office desires to regard, this whole affair as belonging not to the judicial but to the administrative sphere. A conspir- acy, alleged to be dangerous to the Allied forces, is suspected; arrests have been made; interrogations are in progress; no actual charges have been lodged. All this, it is claimed, is quite legitimate under powers reserved to the Occupation authorities; it lies within the province of the High Commissioner as an executive authority, and does not, at present at any rate, concern any judicial authority. It came nevertheless before two judicial authorities, a court of first instance and an appeal court (both British) and both upheld the right of counsel to see their client, the appeal court confirming a condition laid down by the lower court, that the registrar of that court should be present at the interview. The habeas corpus application has failed and Naumann remains in prison, on the ground that the permission granted by the Appeal Court covered only one interview prior to the habeas corpus application. To British ideas all this is petty and vexatious, but in this case normal legal procedure and powers analogous to those under Regulation 18B in this country in war-time are so inextricably mixed up that it is very hard to distinguish what is technically right from what is technically wrong.
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