A Head for a Bomb

In Berlin's Ploetzensee Penitentiary last week a shining ax crashed down. Off rolled the head of intellectual Helmuth Hirsch, the 21-year-old Jew arrested last December for plotting to kill "a high German official"--subsequently believed to be Jew-baiter Julius Streicher--with a bomb (TIME, May 3). Hirsch's family lives in Czechoslovakia, but U. S. diplomats in Berlin had taken him under their wing because his grandfather was a naturalized U. S. citizen. U. S. newspapers whooped for his life, but Hirsch, throughout his imprisonment, admitted he was guilty. He did not deny it in the letter he wrote to his family day before his death.

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