Underground Outcroppings

Not all of the 17,000,000 Germans who voted against the Nazi ticket in November 1932--the last free election in Germany --are converts to Naziism. There is still an underground opposition to Hitler which all the Fuehrer's Horst Wessels and all the Fuehrer's men (5,000,000 storm troops, party workers, secret police) have not stamped out.

Some recent underground outcroppings:

> Dr. Otto Strasser, whose brother Gregor fought Hitler for control of the Nazi Party before being shot in the "Roehm Purge" in 1934, has completed plans to establish a floating radio station aboard a ship which will soon push out from its English base and cruise in the North Sea, whence it will send anti-Nazi propaganda into Germany.

> Recent nightly "straight news" programs from British Broadcasting Corp. in German, designed to counteract the distorted news given by the Nazi officials to the German public, have had a welcome reception in many a German home. BBC has received a surprising number of unsigned letters from German listeners urging it to continue the broadcasts.

> Apparently still unapprehended by the sleuthing Gestapo men are the many members of the German Freedom Party, which manages to publish occasional anti-Nazi leaflets, slips them into letterboxes and under doors.

> Near Duesseldorf, in the Rhineland, it was revealed that German laborers had been asked at a Yuletide Labor Front celebration to write on a slip of paper their answer to the question: "What wish would you like to have fulfilled during 1939?" Six slips read: "A new government!" The rebellious laborers were discovered, sent to a concentration camp.

> In Berlin was begun a great "treason trial," whose size and scope was an embarrassment to the Nazis themselves. Out of the yard of Berlin's grim Moabit Prison rolled a green police van one morning last week. Through Berlin's streets it rumbled, finally pulled up in the well-kept grounds of the dread People's Court building on the Bellevuestrasse. Three prisoners--Ernst Niekisch, Dr. William Drexler and Karl Troegler--emerged from the van and were hustled into the great hall of the Court. On the bench sat their judges--three red-robed justices, a police general and a Nazi storm troop leader.

Thus began a case unequaled in the Reich since the advent of Adolf Hitler. Before its end, expected next week, no less than 122 defendants will have been heard and sentenced. At least 17 of them, including the three principals heard last week, are expected to receive death by the guillotine.

Nazi officials barred the public and foreign newsmen from the trial, permitted German correspondents to attend only "on certain days" and, at first, attempted to keep the charges on which the prisoners will be sentenced a secret. Finally, they approved a communique which announced that the defendants had "agitated against the political and economic aims of the Nazi State and grossly insulted the leading personalities of the Third Reich."

Chief figure in the trial is Ernst Niekisch, a courageous anti-Nazi, who has ridiculed and opposed the policies of Adolf Hitler since the early days when the Nazis fought their political battles on the streets. A onetime schoolteacher, later an author and publisher, Niekisch took a leading part with famed Revolutionary Kurt Eisner in establishing the postWar, short-lived Bavarian Soviet State. When the Nazis came to power, his argument that both Germany and Russia were authoritarian and anticapitalistic and therefore should work together economically had numerous backers in the Nazi Party, chiefly among the followers of Hitler's lieutenant, Ernst Roehm, and Niekisch's publication was allowed to continue. When in 1934 Chancellor Hitler had Roehm shot, however, Niekisch fell into disfavor and was sent to a concentration camp. He was released in six months.

Undeterred, he joined the underground movement against the Nazis, published his pro-Soviet ideas in book form, and was so bold as to call the Fuehrer publicly "a German misfortune." According to knowing foreign correspondents, Herr Niekisch's misfortune was being caught secretly organizing a mass assassination plot against top-rank Nazis, possibly including Hitler himself. The plotters were said to have gone so far as to draw lots to choose the killers.

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