Head Into Basket

On the massive desk of old President Paul von Beneckendorff und von Hinden burg last week lay a letter heavy with Dutch seals. It contained a dignified appeal from Wilhelmina Helena Pauline Maria, Queen of The Netherlands, Princess of Orange-Nassau and Duchess of Mecklenburg. Her Majesty asked only what seemed simple Anglo-Saxon Justice. The death penalty, she urged, should not be inflicted retroactively on her famed subject, the dim-witted Dutch brick mason Marinus van der Lubbe. At the time he set fire to the German Reichstag there was no death penalty for such an act. It was hastily decreed, on the day after the fire, by President von Hindenburg at the frantic insistence of Herren Hitler, Goring and Goebbels. Would not Old Paul commute the sentence of Dutchman van der Lubbe to imprisonment? All Holland was hopeful when the Nazi-controlled Press threw out strong, repeated hints that President von Hindenburg would accede to Queen Wilhelmina's request. Overnight came a Nazi smack in the face to Holland. Van der Lubbe's head had been cut off, the German Government announced, without prior notice of any sort to either Queen Wilhelmina or the German public. Obeying strict orders from Minister of Propaganda & Public Enlightenment Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, German newspapers barely mentioned the Dutchman's execution, stating that "It was the purpose of the German Government to confront the public with an ac complished fact without long preliminary palavers as a token of justice, assurance, determination and as a warning to other international revolutionaries of the Communist persuasion." Since no correspondent witnessed the execution. Dr. Goebbels could and did put out an exclusive Government story of what occurred: At 5 p. m. Public Prosecutor Werner, whose speeches during the Reichstag Trial fill several volumes, entered van der Lubbe's isolated cell, reread the death sentence of the Supreme Court (TIME, Jan. 1), stated that President von Hindenburg had refused to commute it and told van der Lubbe to make ready for death at dawn. During the night a guillotine was hastily knocked together in the prison courtyard. Meanwhile van der Lubbe, who had written numerous letters from his cell to his family in Leyden, refused to write another after Prosecutor Werner told him he was really going to die.* Just after dawn, Prisoner van der Lubbe was led "without showing the least emotion" out onto the grass of the prison courtyard where he stood with hanging head while his death sentence was read a third time by Supreme Court Justice Wilhelm Buenger. Asked if he had any last words, van der Lubbe muttered "No."

'I surrender you, van der Lubbe," cried Prosecutor Werner, "to the executioner!"

Up stepped top-hatted, white-gloved Executioner Goebler. If he had been working anywhere else in Germany he would have used a battle ax but in the State of Saxony, seat of the German Supreme Court, a French-type guillotine is the customary instrument of death. Putting his hand on the prisoner's arm, Executioner Goebler steered van der Lubbe to the guillotine, strapped him down, pressed a button releasing the great knife and stood back as it fell. Into a basket full of absorbent sawdust rolled the head of van der Lubbe.

Commented a high Nazi official in Berlin, "It was a concession that he was not hanged. The [retroactive] law specifies hanging for political arson but hanging is a shameful death. Van der Lubbe was spared that."

An autopsy by neutral Dutch physicians would have proved or disproved the charge that Nazis drugged van der Lubbe into the amazing apathy he showed throughout his trial for life. Though his old father asked for the head and trunk of his son, Public Prosecutor Werner insisted on burying the remains of Marinus van der Lubbe at Leipzig.

Other defendants at the Reichstag trial, all of them acquitted, were still held in prison by the Hitler State last week while their relatives waited in dread lest they be confronted at any moment with another Nazi surprise fait accompli.

*The Dutchman's confession that he alone set the fire (despite the testimony of German experts that he must have had accomplices) is widely accounted for on the theory that Nazis employed penniless van der Lubbe to help them set the fire, promising to save his neck by a Presidential reprieve and to reward him handsomely for hiding their identity and taking the whole blame in court. If this be true, Nazis would obviously have had every reason to stop him from writing letters as soon as he knew he had been double crossed.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.