"Trying to Escape"

Since announcements of German beheadings and prison sentences are now often months delayed, Vienna's meticulous daily Telegraf last week chose the year ending June 30, 1934 for analysis of punitive statistics released by the German Ministry of Justice.

Excluding 184 Germans officially listed as "shot while trying to escape," excluding also some hundred wiped out during the Hitler-Goering "Blood Purge," Vienna's careful Telegraf found that 212 German heads officially "rolled in the sand," struck off by the Nazi executioner's broadax.

During the same year Germans served enough time in prison to average one day in jail for every German adult--more exactly 23.8 hr. per adult. Over 13,000 Germans who had fled abroad were punished by being cut off from German citizenship--there being no exact statistic for this--and in the Fatherland in the same year 12,863 Germans were sterilized.

In Berlin last week the total number of Germans sterilized since Realmleader Hitler began purifying the race was given as 189,677 up to March 1935. Belatedly the Ministry of Propaganda & Public Enlightenment announced that on April 15 the No. 1 German mine workers' leader, Socialist Friedrich E. Husemann, former Reichstag Deputy and member of the Prussian Diet, was "shot while trying to escape."

Socialist Husemann, aged 61, assured his wife at their last meeting that he would be especially careful to make no move of which Nazis could take advantage to shoot him. Cried Frau Husemann: "My poor old husband could never have attempted to escape!" In Prague, where the fugitive Executive Committee of Germany's suppressed Socialist Party has headquarters, the German Government was accused of "encompassing the murder" of Socialist Husemann.

In 1916, after spirited War service, Husemann was elected President of the Federation of Miners in Germany. He also served for years as a member of the International Miners Federation executive board. Because of this service the American Federation of Miners offered to pay his way to the U. S. and pension him after Adolf Hitler seized power and wiped out the Fatherland's trade unions, taking all their funds and stamping out the German Socialist Party. "I do not want to go to America," said Socialist Husemann then. "I prefer to continue living in poverty among our German miners. They need me."

Commenting on the Husemann shooting, the Ministry of Propaganda & Public Enlightenment reminded Germans that "when a man tries to escape he risks being shot down and must take the consequences." As after most Nazi killings, the Husemann corpse was promptly cremated last week at Dortmund.

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