Holy Stupidity

Last week the trial of a German-born Clevelander, too simple to keep his mouth shut or his pencil still in Naziland, furnished the world its first glimpse of the super-secret workings of Adolf Hitler's dread Volksgerricht or "People's Court." "As I stand at my window, seeing marching columns of Storm Troops," jotted down Simple Richard Roiderer in a notebook before his arrest, "I think to myself what slaves they are. A slavish loyalty to a bad cause and a bad leader! They represent the qualities of sadism, perversion and homosexuality that are misnamed in Germany today 'manliness'. "Honor: An 'honor' that delights in defending through brute force and not by the power of argument. An, honor that is too often a camouflage for national aggressiveness!

"Joy in the destruction of the lives and property of the enemy is the climax of this negative philosophy of life."

When jottings such as these were found last June on Mr. Roiderer, then teaching English in Munich, the fact that he is a naturalized U. S. citizen did not prevent his being clapped into a Munich jail, charged with "high treason" to the Fatherland. Efforts by the U. S. Consul General to have access to Roiderer were met with frog-faced assertions that the German Ministry of Justice itself did not know where he was. Realmleader Hitler has set above the German Supreme Court his own death-dealing Volksgerricht, and occasionally someone's head gets chopped off before the fact is known to other than a few Nazi bigwigs. That the head of Simple Richard Roiderer was still upon his shoulders, after ten months in the fog of Nazidom's New Justice, was recently ascertained and he was brought from Munich to Berlin with a cut over his left eye and a large, reddish scab on the bridge of his nose.

"Gosh, I'm Dumb!" As a gesture to U. S. public opinion, the trial of Cleveland's Roiderer last week was the first trial before the People's Court to which foreign correspondents have ever been admitted. Present also was U. S. Consul Raymond H. Geist who had hired to defend dead-broke Roiderer a fashionable Berlin attorney.

Newshawks noticed first that no court stenographer was present--a fact tending to confirm reports that Nazi jurists, knowing that their proceedings are sometimes indefensible, take care to leave no record of the Volksgerricht's proceedings lest a future German Government be moved to hang the jurists of today.

"Gosh, I'm dumb!'' wailed Prisoner Roiderer, his face ashen, eyes bulging and lips aquiver as he hysterically clasped, flopped and wrung his hands. "I am a hare's foot--a scared rabbit--but I am a good German. I am no spy! When I was going from Munich for a little holiday in Switzerland an official called me 'You coward!' and then he said. 'Confess--or we will make you confess!'

"Well, I am a hare's foot, as I said, so then I signed a statement in which I said I intended to publish all that was in the notebook. I didn't mean to publish it all, however--especially not the armament figures."

These figures, testimony revealed, consisted of an itemized list of the war weapons possessed by a local Munich Storm Troop section, despite Adolf Hitler's reiteration that his Storm Troops have never borne arms. The section leader, another simple German, had no typewriter and asked Roiderer as a favor to type the list, allowing him to keep a copy.

The plot thickened when abstemious Richard Roiderer set out to rescue from Munich saloonkeepers another teacher, dissolute Hans Wohlfahrt, letting him sleep in his room and introducing him to his fiancee, Margaret Sichert. "Together we three had nice, long discussions about music and books and art," testified Prisoner Roiderer. "My landlady, however, advised me to 'Be a man' and send Wohlfahrt away from my fiancee. I concede my holy stupidity. Wohlfahrt is not so-good a German as I am!"

Not-so-stupid Hans Wohlfahrt, wishing to have Margaret Sichert to himself, tipped off the Nazi secret police to his benefactor's notebook.

At the trial last week even the German Defense Ministry's scar-jawed observer relaxed his set vigilance and smiled when Roiderer sniffled between sobs, "I am against war. I am a pacifist. I wanted to write articles with the material in my little notebook from the pacifist philosophical viewpoint. I am an idealist. I couldn't sell my articles because American editors are so materialistic. Almost nothing of mine was accepted by anybody and in all I received just $13. I wrote not as an enemy of Germany but as an enemy of war."

"Only Himself To Blame.' Counsel for the defense handed up copies of various U. S. magazines and newspapers, pointing out that everything which was found in Roiderer's notebook had already been factually reported by ordinary journalists. The five judges of the People's Court took 45 minutes to draft a verdict of acquittal which would not be too dead a give-away of the New Justice. They could not say that Roiderer's jotted charges of homosexuality, sadism and camouflaged aggressiveness by some of the highest leaders of Germany were untrue, for their truth is a byword in Germany even to simpletons.

At last, . with what dignity he could muster, President Eduard Springmann of the People's Court ordered the State to pay the cost of the trial and freed Simple Richard Roiderer with these words: "He has only himself to blame. He has gone about indulging in negative critisim of everything pertaining to the new Germany, and he has gravely abused his guest privileges in Germany. Just imagine what would have happened to a German who had done in America what this man has been doing here!"

Discharged, the prisoner, who had insisted all through the trial that he is a German, was given enough money by the U. S. Consul to put up at a cheap hotel. "My God! My God!" cried Simple Richard Roiderer with tears running down his cheeks, "You don't know how good this makes me feel! I am going to see my old mother--this trial has turned her hair white--and my sweetheart in Munich. Then I will sail from Rotterdam to America. I have my ticket."

Since the People's Court does not act from precedent, no precedent was established by the Roiderer acquittal, and foreigners in Germany could place no reliance for the future on an observation in the verdict which surprised most correspondents: "At present the taking of notes is not a criminal offense in Germany. Had the defendant transmitted, or attempted to transmit his notes 'abroad, he would have been liable to punishment."

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