GERMANY: Back to the Axe!

Designing new costumes for himself is the delight of beefy Prussian Premier Captain Hermann Wilhelm Göring. The points of his brownshirt collar (and of his alone) are scarlet. As German Air Minister he affects a topcoat with unique and striking white lapels. He delights in the clucks and murmurs of the masses when he appears in a rakish wild-leder (doeskin) cloak, fastened at the neck with a single clasp. Last week he set the fashion in which Germans condemned to Death will be executed.

Conqueror Napoleon introduced the French guillotine into Prussia. Last week Captain Göring banished it by decree. He substituted the medieval chopping block and headsman’s axe. The headsman, he prescribed, must always wear impeccable evening dress.

No poseur. Captain Göring had just refused to commute the death sentences of four Communists. They were charged with opening a murderous fire on parading Nazi Storm Troops last year at Altona, just below Hamburg on the wimpling River Elbe. Last week in smoky Altona they were beheaded one by one: Shoemaker Karl Wolff, Seaman August Lüttke, Laborer Walter Müller, Locksmith’s Apprentice Bruno Tesch. As their heads flew off and blood gushed high, Nazi satisfaction seemed general. Berlin’s Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung gloated that Captain Göring “did not make use of his pardoning power because of the heinousness of their treacherous attacks and the desirability of setting a deterrent example.” The shots which the dead Reds are supposed to have fired (TIME. July 25, 1932) were seized upon by Germany’s then Chancellor (now Vice Chancellor) Franz von Papen as a pretext to oust by presidential decree the duly elected Socialist government of the State of Prussia (TIME, Aug. 1, 1932). That act—which seemed merely rash at the time—paved the way for Adolf Hitler’s subsequent Cabinet to seize all powers in the Reich and tear up its states’ rights. Last week states which have been using the guillotine hastily bought blocks & axes. “There was much need for a cleaning up of the remnants of French law in Germany,” exulted Berlin’s Allgemeine Zeitung. “Especially was there need to eliminate the guillotine. Capital punishment is inflicted quickly by the axe, in the use of which nothing has ever happened giving rise to complaints.” Inspired by Prussia’s Goring, the Bavarian Ministry of Justice proclaimed at Munich: “Effeminacy must disappear from our administration of justice. The idea of retribution must again be put into the foreground.” On the same day a new Prussian prison code was promulgated by Premier Goring. Denouncing the “humanity nonsense of so-called ‘scientific penology,’ ” the code instructs Prussian jailers thus: “It is to be continually brought to the attention of the prisoner that he has to atone for his wickedness against the legal order of the state by the loss of his freedom. This is to be brought home so vividly by the nature of the infliction of punishment that he will feel an inhibition against any attempt to commit new crimes.” Exclaimed Prussian Minister of Justice Hans Kerrl, explaining the code: “The time has passed for treating jailbirds to lectures, games and the cinema. . . . The only effective punishment is to make offenders dread prison life.”