In reliance upon the decrees “legalizing” nullification and retrial of criminal cases at the prosecution’s behest, defendants were deprived of any assurance that a sentence of less than death was their final fate. Ministry of Justice officials, working through the prosecution, joined in this infliction of double jeopardy. For example, in a case involving a non-German, the defendant Klemm wrote to the president and attorney general of the Stuttgart District Court of Appeals on 5 July 1944 and directed the following (_NG-676, Pros. Ex. 178_): “For some time now, the jurisdiction of the penal senate of the district court of appeals in Stuttgart has given me cause for grave thoughts with regard to matters of defeatism. In the majority of cases, the sentences are considered too mild * * * and are in an incompatible disproportion to the sentences which are in similar cases passed by the People’s Court and by other district courts of appeal. I refer especially to the following sentences which lately attracted my attention: “1. Criminal case against Friedrich Linder, sentence of the Second Penal Senate of 7 January 1944 (President of the Senate, Dr. Kiefer) * * *. You made a report under date 28 April 1944 on this case regarding the sentence. In view of the danger and of the frequency of the statements made by the defendant, I must maintain the interpretation already expressed in my decree of 15 March 1944, IV Secret I 5045B/44 that the defendant, a foreigner, deserved a serious sentence of penal servitude. I have therefore directed the files to the chief Reich prosecutor at the People’s Court to examine the question whether the extraordinary appeal should not be applied against the sentence * * *.”[55] It is technically true that an extraordinary appeal or plea of nullity could, on the face of the enabling decrees, operate to a defendant’s benefit as well as to his detriment; but this possibility was illusory in practice. Dr. Josef Grueb, former judge of the Nuernberg District Court of Appeals, says (_NG-672, Pros. Ex. 179_): “It was obvious that the Ministry of Justice only admitted a petition for nullity when it was unfavorable to the defendant. Cases in which the Ministry ordered a nullity plea unfavorable to the defendant were, at any rate, much more numerous than cases where the petition for nullity was demanded for the benefit of the defendant on the Ministry’s own initiative. * * * It was mainly a means employed by the State to cancel sentences which seemed inadequate in the light of the political conceptions of those times.” A terrifying glimpse of the actual extent to which double jeopardy was exploited during the Third Reich’s last years, is furnished by the defendant Nebelung (_NG-333, Pros. Ex. 177_).