New Martyr

Crape-draped, a German special train was sent to the Swiss frontier last week. From the trim little railway station a plain coffin was carried by big-boned Nazis and heaved aboard. Surviving relatives of the corpse were ushered ceremoniously into the train, and with them rode a Guard of Honor as the special set out for their family home in Schwerin. At all large stations the funeral car stopped opposite a band and local Nazis sang the Horst

Wessel song, hailed "Our Martyr!" Another special steamed out of Munich and, over cleared tracks with all switches spiked, roared down toward Schwerin. This was the luxurious train of the Realmleader, and only a handful of officials knew his destination. It had not been known that Adolf Hitler would orate over the corpse from Switzerland. In the eyes of bored neutrals, nothing had happened except that the No. I Nazi Agent in the Swiss Republic, little-known Wilhelm

Gustloff, had been shot and killed by a Jewish student from Yugoslavia, one David Frankfurter, who admitted frankly that his purpose was "political murder" (TIME, Feb. 17). What this meant to Adolf Hitler the emotional Realmleader told all Europe in a hastily arranged broadcast. Bawling at the top of his lungs, he cried: "You did not die in vain, Wilhelm Gustloff! My dear Party Comrade, what your Jewish murderer did not foresee was that he prepared the way for an awakening of millions and millions of Germans to a truly German way of life. ... In every office will hang Gustloff's picture, in every store! My dear Party Comrade, you will never be forgotten!" "In other years," continued Orator Hitler warming to his speech, "the hate-filled might of our Jewish enemies was often successful in using some Germans as tools against Germans unselfishly devoted to the Fatherland. It was a proud page in the history of the Swiss and for the Germans living in Switzerland that no German and no Swiss could be found to do this deed. The instigator himself had to do it--the Jew! "You, Wilhelm Gustloff, enter the ranks of our nation's immortal martyrs!" concluded Adolf Hitler. "Gustloff will be the patron saint of all Germans living abroad. . . . We do not choose murderous methods! I must proudly state that our movement has never murdered and has never attacked anyone."

Since numerous Nazis were convicted of murder in the German courts before Adolf Hitler came to power, and since the "Blood Purge" he ordered as Chancellor included such outright Nazi murders as the shooting of General and Frau Kurt von Schleicher in their home (TIME, July 9, 1934), this blanket assertion that there has never been even one Nazi murder seemed last week perhaps the most amazing statement thus far by Messiah Hitler.

After he had declared Gustloff a patron saint and after Saint Gustloff had been cremated last week, the Laborite Daily Herald of London professed to have learned from Berlin that as soon as the Olympics are over a decree confiscating all property owned by Jews in Germany, and exiling all Jews from Germany, will be signed by Adolf Hitler to avenge Wilhelm Gustloff. This press officers at the Realmchancellory denied.

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