The Bulletin’s Day Book

Bernhard Weiss, one time head of the Berlin political police and vice-president of the Berlin police department until just before the Nazi advent to power, is now a police official in distant China. Weiss was perhaps more bitterly hated by the Nazis than any two other officials of the Second Reich. As “Isadore,” the appellation bestowed upon him by the Nazis, and applied also by the Communists whom Weiss relentlessly pursued, the diminutive police official seemed to be the embodiment of all that the Nazis hated in the Jews and in the Republic. Yet Dr. Weiss, by an incredible series of events, escaped their ire.

Weiss was traveling around Germany when Hitler assumed the chancellorship oblivious of the fact that detachments of storm troopers who had felt the weight of his authority, were turning Berlin topsy-turvy in a search for the hated “Isadore.” In fact, so the story goes, on one occasion Weiss travelled in the same train as Captain Roehm, storm troop commander. He continued peacefully on his peregrinations completely unaware of the hue and cry raised against him.

One morning, in Hamburg, he picked up Der Angriff and found staring at him the flaring headline: “We Steckt Isadore?” Shocked and indignant, he hurried to the post office and telephoned the Berlin police headquarters he would appear in person. He resented the allegation that he was “in hiding.”

Weiss hired an automobile and sped to Berlin. The police officials failed to recognize him. His successor was not in. A chief of division, who had formerly served under him, received him as though he were a ghost.

“Here I am,” said Weiss. “They are conducting a campaign against me. Is there any charge against me?”

The astounded police official was speechless. He shook his head feebly in the negative and Weiss stalked out of the office. He started for his apartment and a few doors away, met some of his friends who took him in hand. A detachment of storm troopers occupied his apartment awaiting his return, they told, him, and succinctly explained what would befall him if he were apprehended.

Dr. Weiss then began to comprehend, for the first time, what his position was, according to the story told by refugees in Prague, and really went into hiding. He realized the need to flee the country. But how? He had no passport and obviously, could not obtain one. A false passport, such as he had seen hundreds of times during his police career, was the logical solution.

But the former head of the political police, the second ranking police official in the German capital, was unable to obtain a false passport. He didn’t know where to get it.

With the aid of friends, Weiss finally got across the border to Czechoslovakia and lived the life of a refugee at Prague until he got the offer of a job in China.