GERMANY: Hormone Judas

News again last week was the broad-shouldered Judas of the Nazi Party, strapping Gregor Strasser.

Last winter, after the Chancellorship had several times eluded Adolf Hitler’s pudgy grasp, Herr Strasser, then National Organizer of the Nazi Party, decided that the fumble was likely to be permanent. Ambitious, he called secretly upon the then Chancellor, sly Lieut.-General Kurt von Schleicher, famed as “His Field Grey Eminence.” Somehow or other Leader Hitler learned what Strasser and Schleicher were plotting, summoned Nazi storm troop leaders and Deputies from all over Germany to an historic Party meeting in Berlin. “Comrades,” said the Leader gravely, “according to information in my possession Strasser told von Schleicher that he could deliver at least 30 Nazi members of the Reichstag to betray us and support the Schleicher Government, if Schleicher would make Strasser his Vice Chancellor.

“Comrades—I shall now read the list of 30 names.”

Thus confronted, the 30 deputies spurned Judas Strasser and repledged their loyalty to Leader Hitler who three weeks later became Chancellor. Because he knew too many Brownshirt secrets, Judas Strasser was not punished. Later, recalling that in Munich Herr Strasser used to keep a drugstore. Chancellor Hitler made him Commissar (Nazi supervisor) of the great Berlin chemical firm Schering-Kahlbaum A. G. Last week Commissar Strasser suddenly invited all Berlin correspondents to visit his plant.

“There have been charges in the English Press,” he cried, “that Schering-Kahlbaum are a ‘secret arsenal.’ that we are making poison gas. Preposterous! I invite the Press to come and see.”

Gingerly the corps of correspondents, none of them chemists, followed Judas Strasser through a maze of chemical apparatus.

“You see!” he cried, “we are not making poison gas. What are we making? Well, for one thing Schering-Kahlbaum are spending millions of marks to isolate the male sex hormone. Two years ago I predicted that the Nazi Government would do much to restore the German people to their primitive vigor. Most emphatically I am today in the business not of killing men but of curing them. Our hormone experiments are designed to increase manly vigor and courage. Several Berlin policemen have volunteered as subjects and we are making progress.”