Christ Cleared

Only one German close to the Realmleader has a really loose tongue. Last week it was wagging wildly in Nurnberg where bald, barrel-chested Julius Streicher styles himself "Leader of the Franks" and pays scant respect to Prussia or Berlin. On his soth birthday lately he received the accolade of a personal visit from Adolf Hitler who declared: "There is one man on whose wholehearted support I can depend in every situation and who has never wavered one second, Julius Streicher!"

Thus stamped with tacit Hitler approval were such Streicher tongue-waggings as:

P:"I would not let even Adolf Hitler beat me. They say that he once took away my riding whip and beat me with it, but not so! I had lost my whip and when he saw I was without it he bought me a new one."

P:"With my riding whip, I sometimes give it to prisoners I have had taken into protective custody to save them from the mob. Take that schoolteacher Dr. Steinruck who used to talk so big! I went with several Party members into his cell. He began to talk with a weeping voice and acted like a schoolboy. He did not act like the man I had expected after so much big talk, so I gave him a good thrashing with my whip."

Last week Julius Streicher took a day off, ran up to Cologne and delivered a speech in which his henchmen said he "cleared Christ"--i. e. dissociated from the Savior the usual concept of His race.

"If I should stamp Christ as a Jew I would stamp Him as a criminal!" cried the No. 1 Frank. "Christ was just as un-Jewish as is Hitler! My friends, just as Christ was once mocked, so certain haughty gentlemen used to mock our Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler. They mocked him as a 'house painter,' as a 'laborer,' but they mock him no longer. Just as 2,000 years ago Christ began to speak in a small circle to poor, simple people while the proud and the rich and the noble stayed away, just so the same thing has repeated itself in our time. Simple men with no college education rule the Fatherland today. Not long ago a certain professor whom you all know expressed publicly the opinion that the leading men in Germany should be college men. That professor got a taste of my whip. I personally chastised him."

In the opinion of potent Chastiser Streicher, say his friends, the way to settle the current grave discord in the German Protestant Church (TIME, March 25, April 1) is to create a "partnership of Christ and Hitler" by making the Realmleader, who happens to be a Catholic, also a Protestant bishop as was All Highest Wilhelm II by virtue of being King of Prussia.

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