[1][2][3][4] Wilhelm Nowack was born at Altenburg, a small town at the eastern end of Thuringia in central-southern Germany After successfully completing his schooling he moved on to study Economics and Civil Law at the universities of Berlin and Innsbruck.

Republicanism, in the context of Germany in the 1920s, meant support for democratic government and rejection of the widespread hankering after a return to all the traditional pomp and values of the empire years between 1871 and 1918.

[1] After the Hitler government took power in January 1933 Nowak continued to work as a journalist on a freelance basis, contributing to a number of newspapers including the Frankfurter Zeitung, which somehow managed to survive until 1943.

[11] He stayed with the DDP after 1930 when the party rebranded and relaunched itself as the Deutsche Staatspartei in a desperate effort to dissuade voters, badly hit by the economic backwash from the Wall Street crash, from transferring their political support to populist politicians.

[2] He was succeeded in the post by the lawyer-politician Hans Georg Dahlgrün, an emollient character who, importantly, was not formally a member of any political party, despite having served as a government official at the national Ministry of Finance between 1936 and 1945.

[15] Nowack's sudden retirement from parliament and from ministerial office towards the end of 1958 came in connection with a criminal investigation which concluded, in December 1961, with a conviction, a 2,000 Mark fine and a six-month suspended (i.e. probationary) prison sentence.

According to detailed and well researched press reports he had purchased 20 shares in a company called "Schnellpressenfabrik Frankenthal AG", which was 75% state owned, and of which Nowack, was the ex-officio chairman by virtue of his ministerial office.

Coalition partners and opposition groups in the Rhineland-Palatinate State Parliament had held back from any immediate response to press reports of the matter in June 1958, giving them time to check carefully the extent to which any parliamentary colleagues might be vulnerable to similar accusations, in the event of launching an attack in parliament and/or through the media against Nowack; but during the later summer of 1958 the state premier Peter Altmeier had come under increasing pressure to persuade Nowack to resign.

"That this notorious accomplice of Nazi terrorist-justice launches this prosecution against me is a matter of inestimable shamefulness" ("Man hat sich nicht entblödet ausgerechnet diesen notorischen Helfershelfer nationalsozialistischer Terrorjustiz zum Ankläger gegen mich zu machen.").

[16] It was intolerable that the justice system had "reinserted this Leon Drach into the [privileged] circle of judges and prosecutors as though nothing had happened to justify any sanction beyond, at worst, dismissal followed by reinstatement”.

("...diesen Leon Drach ... wieder in den Kreis ihrer Richter und Staatsanwälte eingereiht, so als ob nichts oder schlimmstenfalls ein pensionsfähiges 'Kavaliervergehen' vorläge").

[16] Nowack thundered in his closing paragraph that he rejected prosecution by a war criminal ("Ich lehne es ab, mich von einem Kriegsverbrecher anklagen zu lassen").

Dr.Kohl himself then appeared to recant from his earlier certainty, suggesting that people such as Drach, who were particularly heavily burdened by their "wartime activities", should no longer be employed as state prosecutors or judges.

[16] Schneider's attempt retrospectively to vindicate Drach "represented a completely false assessment of the inhuman persecution that had taken over in Luxembourg during the war" ("...stellt eine völlige Verkennung der unmenschlichen Verfolgungsmaßnahmen dar, die während des Krieges in Luxemburg ergriffen wurden").

[16] Victor Bodson, who as Luxembourg's Minister of Justice back in 1954 had signed off on the release, expressed himself more pithily: "We chucked the muck over the Moselle [across the border into Germany]" ("Wir haben den Dreck über die Mosel abgeschoben").

[16] After the entire matter had been publicised, and following the launch of an investigation by regional parliamentary committee, Leonhard Drach's application for early retirement was accepted with effect from 30 April 1966.

[20] His name was included in Albert Norden's "Brown Book" in which the author "outed" approximately 1,800 members of the West German political and administrative establishment whom he claimed to have identified as former Nazis.

[21] As a very old man, when interviewed, Leonhard Drach was still maintaining that he had only acted in accordance with the law ("Ich habe nur nach Recht und Gesetz gehandelt").