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| “ | I was an officer! A soldier, like you! | „ |
| ~ Anders rationalizing his war crimes to Detective Lennie Briscoe. |
Stefan Anders is the main antagonist of the Law & Order episode "Evil Breeds". He is a Nazi war criminal who conspires with a neo-Nazi record producer to murder one of his former victims to prevent her from testifying against him at a war crimes tribunal.
He was portrayed by the late George Bartenieff.
Early life[]
Anders was a low-ranking member of the SS during World War II and fought in the Eastern Front. After the German Army was defeated at Stalingrad, the SS transferred him to the Bobrek concentration camp in Poland to work as a guard. While he treated the prisoners with surface politeness, always taking care to end his orders with "bitte" (German for "please"), he soon became notorious for his cruelty whenever a prisoner angered him. In one incident, he shot and killed a prisoner because she was too weak and emaciated to get up after falling. When another prisoner, Rebecca Glaser, cried out in horror, he killed her as well, right in front of her sister and fellow prisoner Leah; he also murdered four other women who cried after witnessing his sadism.
After the war, Anders repatriated to the United States and settled in New York City, where he worked as a mechanic, married, and had a son, Thomas. He kept his war crimes hidden by insisting that he had merely been a low-ranking soldier and did not subscribe to the Third Reich's genocidal policies.
When the Soviet Union fell, Russian intelligence agencies turned over Anders' SS file to the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Special Investigations (OSI), which investigates war crimes; his file implicated him in mass murder and crimes against humanity. They interviewed Leah, who identified Anders as the guard who executed her sister and five other prisoners for no reason. They then arrested Anders, now an elderly widower, took away his U.S. citizenship, and began processing him for deportation back to Germany, where he would face a war crimes tribunal that would condemn him to death if he was found guilty. Glaser was the OSI's chief witness.
Shortly before the events of the episode, Anders befriended Kyle Mellors, a neo-Nazi who ran a record label, Heritage Records, that specialized in white supremacy-themed heavy metal. Anders appealed to Mellors' hero worship and antisemitism to talk him into killing Glaser, without whom the OSI's case against him would fall apart. Mellors then broke into Glaser's house, smothered her to death, and fled the scene.
"Evil Breeds"[]
When NYPD Homicide Detectives Lennie Briscoe and Ed Green investigate Glaser's murder, they find out about her testimony about what she went through during the Holocaust and learn that she was going to be a witness in Anders' deportation hearings. Lieutenant Anita Van Buren gets them a search warrant for Anders' house, where they find Glaser's locket, which Mellors had given him as a trophy to celebrate her death. They then arrest him for murder.
Anders claims that he never met Glaser, but Executive Assistant District Attorney Jack McCoy and Assistant District Attorney Serena Southerlyn confront him with the fact that he served as a guard at Bobrek when she was imprisoned there; Anders then claims that he was only a low-level guard and never hurt any prisoners.
Meanwhile, Mellors gets Anders a high-priced lawyer, Dan Jensen, who tries to use Holocaust denial as a defense strategy; he argues that Nazi Germany did not engage in genocide during the war and thus, Anders cannot be charged as a war criminal. The trial judge, Donald Karan, forbids Jensen to make such an argument in his courtroom, as he and Anders planned all along; they now have grounds for an appeal should they lose, which would draw out the deportation hearings out even longer.
McCoy and Southerlyn discover that Mellors is paying Anders' legal bills, while Briscoe and Green match his fingerprints to ones left at the crime scene, so they arrest him for murder. McCoy and Southerlyn offer him a reduced sentence of 20 years to life in prison in return for testifying against Anders; when he refuses, they decide to try both defendants together.
During the trial, McCoy calls as a witness a crime scene technician who testifies that Mellors' fingerprints were on Glaser's throat, while DNA from Anders' sweat was on her doorknob. Anders testifies in his own defense that he went to Glaser's apartment to talk to her and convince her that he was not the guard who murdered her sister, and that her death is the worst thing that could have happened to him because it means he will deported.
In response, McCoy plays a recording of Glaser's testimony about Anders murdering her sister. The jury is so horrified that they find both Anders and Mellors guilty of first-degree murder. As Anders is taken out of the courtroom, he locks eyes with Thomas, who looks at him with horror and contempt.
External links[]
- Stefan Anders on the Law & Order Wiki
