Foreign News: Horst Wessel Windup

From his Berlin bench a Nazi judge scowled down last week at the witness box in which sat Frau Elizabeth Salm. “Just go on lying as you are,” said His Honor. “Do you imagine we are capable of believing you were making coffee in your kitchen while in the next room your lodger was being shot?” The lodger was famed Horst Wessel. the student who adapted a German sea chanty into Nazidom’s anthem and became the official brownshirt martyr after he was shot by Communists in Frau Salm’s boarding house. The shooting of Horst Wessel by four Communists occurred in 1930 before Hitler’s rise to power and the confessed No. 1 shooter died in jail, but Nazis, bent on winding up the case in their own way, insisted on trying last week three more Communists—Sol Epstein, Hans Ziegler and Peter Stoll (TIME, May 14). “I wouldn’t kill a fly!” cried Defendant Stoll. “Oh, no!” snorted the judge. “But you could stand guard while a man was being murdered!” Convicted of standing outside Frau Salm’s boarding house, Herr Stoll was sentenced to seven and a half years at hard labor. The State’s star witness was a certain Herr Jembrowski who was let out of prison long enough to tattle on Ziegler and Epstein and to declare: “Horst Wessel was murdered by the command of Communist party leaders.” On the strength of this testimony Epstein and Ziegler were sentenced to decapitation. No effort was made to hush up the fact that Hero Horst Wessel, far from disliking women as has been suggested, kept a buxom mistress, Lucie of the Alexanderplatz. Also cleaned up last week was the biggest high treason trial ever held in Germany, with no defendants. German papers reported the trial only on the first day. After that Communist defendants by the dozens began retracting confessions of treason which they dared to accuse Nazis of having exacted from them with pistols, bludgeons and castor oil. A comparative fizzle, the trial closed with 26 acquittals and dismissals and 84 prison sentences of from six months to 15 years.