Eight distinguished American jurists sat in judgment yesterday while “expert witnesses,” some bitter, some aroused, and one sobbing, offered testimony against Nazi Germany in the first two sessions of the American Inquiry Commission’s probe into conditions in the Reich of today.
Around the long conference table sat Clarence Darrow, Arthur Garfield Hays, Dudley Field Malone, George Z. Medalie, Senator William Costigan, Roger Baldwin, John L. Elliott and Raymond L. Wise.
Witnesses were: Aneurin Bevan, Labor member of the British Parliament; Dr. Kurt Rosenfeld, former Prussian Minister of Justice; Mrs. Amabel Williams-Ellis, English author and journalist, and Mrs. Anna Scheer, wife of John Scheer, who was murdered by Nazis in Germany. No witness appeared to defend Germany’s position.
Dr. Rosenfeld, speaking in German, analyzed the newly-promulgated Nazi People’s Courts from a legal point of view. “The regime in Germany,” he asserted, “is one of murder and suicides and there can be no question of justice in the new Reich.
WHY THE COURTS
“The People’s Courts were promulgated because the defendants in the Reichstag fire case were acquitted, and the Nazis had to have a sure method of convicting their enemies. I can’t call what is happening in Germany justice.
“The new law declares to be treason what no former law defined as treason—the forming of a new political party, influencing the masses against the present regime, and disseminating information against the government.
“The law provides for widespread death penalty and hard labor. Under ‘protective custody,’ which is not provided by law, a person may be kept in prison after the expiration of his term without a hearing in any court.
“Brown Shirts are allowed to make arrests. Brown Shirts can do anything. There are concentration camps that the government does not know of, maintained by the Brown Shirts for their own pleasure.
“The People’s Court consists of five judges all appointed by Chancellor’ Hitler—provided Hitler is still chancellor—on the basis of service to the Nazi party.
JUDGES ALL-POWERFUL
“The defendant cannot choose his counsel, who must be approved by the court. Even after approval, the court can, during the case, throw out a defense attorney. Further, if the case does not proceed to the Nazis’ liking, the minister of justice can change the law in the middle of the trial.
“Admittedly innocent people are arrested as hostages for those the Nazis cannot lay their hands on.”
Smiles greeted Dr. Rosenfeld’s explanation of his disbarment. He was disbarred, he said, because he had defended Communists, because as a notary he had certified the signatures of people resigning from the church, thereby aiding atheism, and because he had in his office a picture painted by Daumier of a jurist embracing a woman, Justice, which, it was charged, acted as a disintegrating force against German justice because it was a French jurist and a French woman.
Testifying on the position of woman, during the afternoon, Mrs. Williams-Ellis declared that woman is in the same position as the Jew—holding jobs Hitler wants for his followers.
“Children,” she said, “are indoctrinated with the idea that Jews are inferior—halfway between man and beast.”
CITES PERSECUTIONS
During the morning session Mrs. William-Ellis testified that Jews alone were not persecuted. She said that oppression of the Catholics and Protestants is being felt throughout the Reich.
The British writer cited the case of a number of Catholic priests who had been held in concentration camps for various causes, chief among them being criticism of the government, ridiculing members of the administration and their actions, and for not flying the swastika in their churches.
She described in detail Nazi methods of hostage holding.
An unnamed seaman, who had been held in a concentration camp near Bremen for fourteen days, described the horror of life under the swastika — particularly in Nazi prisons. He said he was severely beaten twice, punched daily, fed bad food, and worked from six in the morning to seven at night. He said one of his fellow prisoners had been beaten so badly by Nazi guards that shortly after his removal to a hospital, he died. This person he identified as Herman Draper.
Another, a Mr. Berens, a cafe owner, he said, was “taken for a ride,” and killed by stormtroopers for no criminal or political offense.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
