STUTTGART, Germany -- Week after week, in a very bright, white courtroom, dim memories spill out, and the trial of the last Nazi charged with the mass murders of the Holocaust grinds on.
No others remain who are known.
It has taken a lifetime to bring this man, Josef Schwammberger, to trial. And when the judge renders his verdict, the German nation's long courtroom confrontation with its past may be done.
But endings aren't always precise. Josef Schwammberger is now an old man in a brown sweater. At 79, he is described by his doctor as partially senile, with a weakened heart, a deteriorating spine, a head that hurts and ears grown deaf. His accusers are aged or dead. And this trial, like some others before it, has become a contest between the infirm, in the reconstruction of the unimaginable, in a culture that does not wish to hear.
The aged accusers who can, take the stand to speak for themselves. The three judges take turns reading the sworn statements of the dead.
"It must be the first time in a modern trial that someone is being charged with events that took place a half-century ago," said Dieter Koenig, the attorney appointed by the state to represent Mr. Schwammberger. "Some of the testimony is convincing. A lot of it is confused."
Week after week, in quavering tones or calm ones, the testimony mounts about the murders of almost 3,500 Jews, people plundered for the gold in their teeth, holy men and ordinary people shot, babies bashed and burned. It all happened when the SS liquidated the ghettos in three towns near Krakow, Poland, in 1942 and 1943. Sergeant Schwammberger was in charge.
He admits that, but he denies killing anyone, or sending Jews to the concentration camps to be murdered. "That was all done by the Gestapo," he said in a shaking voice one day, in one of the few complete sentences he has uttered at this trial. "I didn't have anything to do with it."
One of the towns was Przemysl. There, a survivor named Siegfried Kellerman testified, Sergeant Schwammberger had his men build a bonfire, and then ordered the residents to surrender their jewelry and gold. "Schwammberger and two or three others then shot the people and tossed their bodies directly on the fire," Mr. Kellerman said matter-of-factly, with a look at the bald head and averted gaze of former Sergeant Schwammberger. "The children weren't even shot. They were grabbed by the leg and smashed against a wall, and then their bodies were thrown in the fire."
On an average, a few German wire service reporters hear this, and a few public high school classes, the ones that are university bound, whose teachers bring them in. But in the nearly six months since its beginning, when it was reported as a historic event and a great instruction for the unified nation, the trial has played only episodically in the newspapers. And the public has stayed away.
Mr. Schwammberger does not always seem to be all there himself. While his wife remains in Argentina, where for decades they had lived a routine life, the defendant stays in the hospital wing of the state prison here. Twice a week, usually, for three hours -- all his doctor says he can tolerate -- he comes to court and sits expressionless, looking up from under bushy black brows at the ceiling, as tortured memories spill from the stand.
Some of those memories have been stored in archives for years. They were taken as statements from survivors of the Holocaust by investigators in Israel in the 1960s, in case those survivors should die before their torturers could be brought to trial. One day, after the judges had read for hours from those transcripts, Judge Herbert Luippold asked the defendant if he had any questions or comments to make.
"I can't understand you. I can't hear you," Mr. Schwammberger answered.
"It sounds like you can hear me," Judge Luippold said.
Mr. Koenig, the defense attorney, spoke up. "He meant he didn't understand anything that went on for the past three hours," he said.
"Oh," Judge Luippold replied, and shrugged his shoulders as he left the courtroom.
If memories are not always heard, they also are not always in accord.
On Sept. 20, 1942, the holy day of Yom Kippur, eight witnesses all agreed, a man known as Rabbi Fraenkel was singled out and shot to death.
Four of the witnesses said they saw Mr. Schwammberger pull the trigger. Another four either changed their stories or said they didn't see. And four others who now are dead all claimed in written testimony taken in the 1960s that a young officer shot the rabbi and that Mr. Schwammberger just stood and watched.
Most of the witnesses said they didn't know why Rabbi Fraenkel was murdered, although one said that he was accused of sabotage, and another that a spy had turned him in for being a rabbi. These issues all matter, because if the evidence shows that Mr. Schwammberger shot the rabbi on another's order, or that he participated in the murder but didn't shoot him, then he can only be charged with accessory to murder, as he is in the deaths of 3,377 other people in the ghettos.
But if the judges find that he shot the rabbi by his own decision, then Mr. Schwammberger would be charged with murder, as he is in 44 other deaths.
Max Millner, at 65 one of the youngest witnesses at this trial, came from Israel to say that he watched Mr. Schwammberger shoot the rabbi. The years of the Holocaust were overwhelming for the Millner family. Eighty-one of them, Mr. Millner said, died. Only he survived. And he remembers very clearly that Mr. Schwammberger shot the rabbi at roll call in the evening.
"He said: Mr. Rabbi Fraenkel, please step out of the line. You, Rabbi Fraenkel, are going to be shot for sabotage. He then killed him with two shots."
When told that others now dead had said that Rabbi Fraenkel was killed at morning roll call by the young officer, not Mr. Schwammberger, Mr. Millner remained adamant in his recollection. He was, he said, "100 percent" sure.
The prosecutors have refused all comment until this proceeding comes to an end. But critics of the German justice system say that many of the problems of trying a case half a century after the crime could have been avoided if the Germans had worked harder sooner to bring the defendant to trial.
Mr. Schwammberger was arrested in July 1945 by Austrian officials, who found sacks of gold, jewelry and gold tooth fillings in his apartment. Witnesses identified him, and he was put in a prison run by French occupying forces. He escaped, however, and was given help by an Austrian Roman Catholic bishop to reach Spain, where he took a ship to Argentina in 1948.
There he was given low-level work by friends at various German companies. He lived under his own name.
Although different offices of the West German Embassy in Buenos Aires apparently offered him a new passport in 1954, received information that he was living there in 1972, and continued issuing state pension checks to his wife for years, Mr. Schwammberger was caught only when an informant turned him in to collect a reward of $300,000 offered by the West German government.
The official foot-dragging in the Schwammberger case has been contrasted in the German media with the zeal with which West Germany hunted terrorists in the 1970s and 1980s, and the vigor with which unified Germany is prosecuting East Germans for shootings along the German-German border.
But the lack of interest is consistent with entire 30 years of Nazi trials in Germany. Not only did the trials all start late -- they got under way in the 1960s -- but the structure has been the same.
The witnesses tell of the murders they saw, the brutalities they endured. The defense attorneys point out inconsistencies. And the defendant says next to nothing.
In the end, there frequently has been little doubt that the defendant was responsible for dozens of murders, but much of the evidence was found inadequate for a court of law, and the defendants got off lightly.
This trial is expected to last until spring. But it is reminiscent of the much-criticized Majdanek trial of 10 years ago. At the end of that case, the chief judge hesitated and then haltingly read his decision. Of the nine charged with running the Majdanek work camp, only one received a life sentence; the rest were given six months to eight years.
"He must have known in this moment how unbearably difficult his office is: To have to judge in the name of the people without being able to be just," a commentator for the weekly journal Die Zeit wrote of that decision.
It cannot be said whether justice in this case will seem so blurred come spring. But in the case of the last Nazi charged with mass murder, the memories in evidence are not so clear.