GERMANY: Space for Death

Czech undergraduates at historic Prague University were roused to fury last week as death came to their 22-year-old political martyr, Medical Student Jan Opletal. On Oct. 28 he went out to celebrate Czechoslovak “Independence Day” and was brought home with six revolver bullets in his body. Shouting “Long Live Freedom!” and “Away With the Murderers!” his mourners marched with torchlights to Vinohradsky Square.

Defiant speeches drew a crowd of thousands, and patient Czech police, without truncheons or revolvers, began slowly and persuasively to edge the excited students down toward the river. Some students who refused to be herded broke from the rest, dashed into old Palace Square. Since they seemed bent on nothing more than singing Czech and Slovak national anthems, the unarmed Czech police were all for letting them alone, but German civilians with drawn revolvers suddenly appeared and drove the police to drive the students back to their university.

At this point riot cars full of Schutzstaffeln (Hitler Elite Guards) took over. Rolling up to the university, they unlimbered machine guns, began to haul off “ringleaders.” In dormitories, where many who had not turned out for the demonstration were still in their night clothes, some of the students hastily piled up barricades of tables, beds and chairs. Others fled into the night amid a, spray of Nazi machine-gun bullets. When the skirmish ended, scores of the wounded were carried off to Prague hospitals.

Afterward Schutzstaffel men claimed they found in the university an anti-Nazi broadcasting station and secret printing plant. Soon Prague heard the crack of firing squads. Nine Czech students were executed, and all universities in the Protectorate were closed for three years, treatment no less harsh than the Tsars used to give their rebellious undergraduates. Over 2,000 people were arrested in Prague. Eight hundred were almost immediately released, but the Nazis were said to be sending many of the rest to the notorious Buchenwald prison camp in Germany near Weimar.

In Prague, the Elite Guard garrison was raised to 10,000, the city placed under martial law. A terse communique soon announced the execution of three more Czechs, two of them policemen, “because of acts of violence against a German,” which were not revealed. Czech Communists meanwhile stuck up in Prague during the night hammer-&-sickle posters advising Germans to “Clear out before Stalin comes.”

Czech Cavells. In London, former Czecho-Slovak President Dr. Eduard Benes predicted that the Prague executions will “play in Czech opinion the same part as the assassination of Nurse Edith Cavell played in English public opinion during the World War.” In Washington, the Czecho-Slovak Legation half-staffed its flag in mourning, and Minister Vladimir Hurban cried that what happened in Prague “is further proof . . . that living space [Lebensraum] for the Nazi Germans means space for death [Todesraum] for the rest of the world!”

It took 48 hours for the Germans to get puppet Protectorate President Dr. Emil Hacha on the air with a broadcast suited to Nazi tastes. Apparently he at first refused to speak, and this silence was explained away in Berlin by the Fiihrer’s own newspaper, which said that Dr. Hacha was seriously ill and was not expected to leave his bed for a long time. A few hours later President Hacha, seemingly in good health, appeared at Castle Lana and gloomily broadcast: “Any further sacrifice for the Czech Nation serves no purpose. . . . Face the cold realities. . . . Senseless opposition to armed might . . . can’t win, but on the contrary can lose much. . . . The Czech people have been spared the horrors of war, such as defeated Poland, and our sons have not been led into battle, as in the case of Austria. You are able, almost all of you, to work in peace. In certain ways your position is probably better than that of a neutral country.”

Nazis Nervous? While the Czech rebellion was being crushed, underground reports from Germany proper suggested some Nazi nervousness lest a revolution or coup d’etat be attempted by Germans to secure a new Government—possibly monarchist—with which Great Britain and France would be willing to make a quick peace on favorable terms. Scions of the Habsburg and Metternich houses were mentioned as the object of active German intrigue and Adolf Hitler was said to have summoned former German Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm for a conference at the Chancellery which became highly emotional.

Berlin correspondents quickly disposed of wild reports that Friedrich Wilhelm had been “beheaded as a traitor”—he was seen going about the capital in his usual haunts —and it was presently rumored that the Fiihrer might decide to enthrone a likely candidate as Emperor and serve under this figurehead as Chancellor—as II Duce serves under Vittorio Emanuele III. Theory of this shift would be to save the faces of Allied statesmen who may want to deal with the Nazi regime but feel they cannot do so unless some disguise—however transparent—is arranged.

Last week the No. 1 German industrialist, Fritz Thyssen, who in early Nazi days gave Hitler invaluable fiscal support, suddenly arrived with his wife and child at the Locarno Hotel in Lucerne, settled down for “an indefinite stay.” Said Tycoon Thyssen: “As a member of the Reichstag I expressed myself in timely and emphatic fashion against the war and the present policy of the Reich Government. This political attitude threatened to cause consequences which forced me to leave Germany.”

Revolt by Spring? Nearest thing to a blueprint for revolution in the Reich was outlined at Paris last week by Otto Strasser whose famed brother Gregor, Deputy Leader of the Nazi Party as recently as 1932, was slain in the Fiihrer’s “purge” of dissident Nazis two years later. German secret police charges that Otto Strasser instigated the recent Munich Nazi Beer Hall bombing (TIME, Nov.. 20) caused the Swiss Government to expel him last week. “I thought at first that my friends had been implicated . . . when I heard the false reports that Hess [Deputy Nazi Party -With Nazi Protector Baron XeurathLeader Rudolf Hess] had been killed,” said Herr Strasser on arrival in P’aris. The fact that no Nazi bigwig was killed in the explosion convinced him, he said, that the Nazis themselves had set the bomb to increase the Fiihrer’s popularity, and he cracked with a grin: “The beer hall, four weeks before, had been insured by a Swiss company!”

“I have constant relations not only with my own organization in Germany but also with numerous soldiers and members of the Nazi Party,” Otto Strasser told the Paris-Soir. “I can tell you that Germany is ready for an anti-Hitler revolution but it will take time. Higher officers of the Army are too subservient to Hitler to take part. But the Nazis have many enemies among the colonels, majors and subordinate officers. For a revolt to be successful in the Reich, three things will be needed. First, Germans who still believe in Hitler must feel the horrors of war; second, the Reich must suffer its first military reverses, and, finally, privations in the country must become more acute. All these things can happen by the spring of 1940. Hitlerism will perish through internal revolt.”