27
evening with no lights on. The court nevertheless found that the witness had sufficient opportunity to see the person about whom he testified. The circumstances underlying the present proceeding are considerably different from those of the ordinary criminal case. The respondent had no reason to conceal his criminal activities since the Nazis were the government and he was serving the Nazis. He did not need to lurk in darkened doorways while committing his crimes. Consequently, his victims had greater opportunity to observe him than had he been a common felon. 34/
2. Degree of attention
In Manson, the witness was a trained police officer who knew that he would have to make a subsequent identification of the person with whom spoke through the partially open door. The Supreme Court obviously took this qualitative factor into account and allowed it to offset the quantitive factor, i.e. the relative brevity of the encounter. In the present case, the witnesses were not professional observers and undoubtedly never thought they would testify one day about the terror which they seemed unlikely to survive. On the other hand, they were not casual bystanders to the events which they witnessed. They knew that they might be the next to feel the whip or the boot, so they took what opportunities they could to see what was
| 34/ | For example, Wagenheim saw him a number of times at the ghetto, (tr. 4291) and Mendelkorn and Wulfowitz saw him throughout the days they spent at the Prefecture. (tr. 31-452; 2133) |
| 1 | Testimony of Jakob Wegenheim, 31-October-1977, direct, transcript pp. 408–443. |
| 2 | Testimony of Ber Mendelkorn, 25-October-1977, direct, transcript pp. 15–93. |
| 3 | Testimony of Mendel Wulfowitz, 26-October-1977, direct, transcript pp. 199–232A. |