OCCUPIED EUROPE: Gestapo on Trial

Around its conference tables last week, the Gestapo was none too pleased with itself. One of its biggest jobs was not getting done. Throughout Occupied Europe pudgy Heinrich Himmler and his lean Chief Executioner Reinhard Heydrich kept hanging and shooting rebels. But still the revolt went on.

Yugoslavia’s civil war raged harder than ever. The Nazis and their stooges caught so much hell from former Yugoslav soldiers, Serb Chetnik guerrillas and other Yugoslav patriots that puppet Premier Milan Neditch of Serbia called on the peasantry to battle for the Axis. Snorted a Serb spokesman in Ankara: “If Neditch thinks that he can persuade the peasants to turn upon their own fathers, sons and brothers fighting in the mountains, he has taken leave of his senses.”

The people of Czecho-Slovakia stuck to sabotage. Arriving in Manhattan, Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk of Czecho-Slovakia explained why most of Europe’s governments-in-exile encourage sabotage rather than bloody revolution. Said he: “The Nazis have already killed 2,000 of our people. My message to the Czechs, when I speak every week by short wave from London, is telling them to slow down production in the factories. Take the Skoda works with, say, 40,000 workers. If every one of those men” dawdles and takes an extra two minutes when he goes to the rest room, the Germans lose 80,000 minutes of production a day.”

But the people of Czecho-Slovakia got the same treatment as Yugoslavia’s open rebels. Chief Executioner Heydrich made no fine distinction among the victims of his firing squad and noose. Many of his victims were saboteurs. Many were small businessmen and peasants who owned guns or listened to foreign radio programs. Many were simply Czechs. They were all the same to Reinhard Heydrich; his job was at stake.

This week Heinrich Himmler and his merry men learned that in Nantes, Occupied France, two rebels had pumped lead into the loftiest Nazi victim yet—General Holtz, Commandant of the whole Nantes region.

The Gestapo itself was on trial. So far it had failed to finish the job. but it still had hope.