Die Feme .

Das Schwarze Korps put it bluntly: "In occupied Germany ... no German official can carry out foreign orders without certain knowledge that he will shortly sit cold and stiff behind his desk. No German judge can pronounce a sentence dictated by the enemy without being found hanged in the night."

Germans muttered a shuddery word: Feme, from the Old German veme, meaning punishment. Cornered Nazis were turning back to the lawless early '20s, when Feme courts spread terror among republicans. They planned a second revival of the medieval Feme, the law of the days of the robber barons.

Noose & Sword. Few people in the past have thought of the law-obsessed Germans as haunted by a terrorist secret society, older and more dreaded than the Sicilian Maffia. The origins of the Feme go back to the year 1200. Ostensibly an arm of the Holy Roman Empire, the Feme really stemmed from pagan traditions. Its extralegal courts were held under mystic linden trees, on open hilltops or beneath great oaks. The paraphernalia included a two-handed sword on which the members swore, and a noose of linden fibers for the victim. The sentence of its secret tribunals was always death.

To make sure that its secrets remained secret, inadvertent passers-by were also hanged forthwith. For signature, the Feme stuck a knife in the gallows tree and carved four letters: S.S.G.G., for Strick, Stein, Gras, Grun (Rope, Stone, Grass, Green). Folklore interpreted this literally as noose, headstone and grassy grave.

Strongest in Westphalia, the Feme of 700 years ago had a Robin Hood flavor. But by 1500, the Feme had become a synonym for persecution. Membership had grown above 100,000 and many used the protection of the Feme for their own ends. But such was its terror that less than 100 years ago scrolls sealed by the Feme could still be found in German archives. On the seals was written: "None may read unless he be a juror of the Feme"--and none had read.

Shadowy Link. The revived Feme of the Weimar Republic was dedicated to the destruction of democracy, the resurrection of Teutonism and Junkerdom. It started in Bavaria. After World War I, German nationalists flocked together in societies, some of them secret like the C Organization, some studiedly innocent like the German Wrestling Bund or the German Social Employment Society. The link was the shadowy Feme, hidden wherever arms were hidden--on Junker estates in East Prussia and Silesia, and in Bavaria. Protection was supplied by the unreconciled in the Republic's Government, by discontented ex-officers in the Black Reichswehr and the Free Corps. From these came many an early Nazi.

In operation, Feme courts resembled the Maffia, the Ku Klux Klan and the vigilantes. Secret sentences of its kangaroo courts lay behind 354 political murders committed between the 1918 armistice and June 24, 1922, the day Germany's Jewish Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau died at the hands of the Feme. For all its crimes, two Feme murderers received light sentences in the skittish Weimar courts; the rest were left alone.

Last week the Allied world heard Nazi plans for going underground, reports of secret training for underground Nazis, secret hideouts in the Black Forest and Bavaria, bold schemes to whisk Belgium's King Leopold, Stalin's son Jacob and other distinguished prisoners of the Germans to Japan by submarine. There they would be held as hostages in case Allied threats to bring Nazi war criminals to trial meant business. Behind these schemes stirred the shadow of the Feme, once more emerging from the twilight.

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