GERMANY: New Justice

Cultured citizens of Cleveland, Ohio were pained last week by the tribulations of large-eared, long-nosed Richard Roiderer, a cultured Clevelander accused by the German Government of high treason. Cleveland friends called Mr. Roiderer "more of a thinker than one obsessed with political intentions." He thinks much about music, they said, and about world peace. During his incarceration since June 22 in a Nazi jail, Musical Thinker Roiderer has asked for and obtained copies of Musical America and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. To Germans the Roiderer case is of vital interest because it tends to lift the veil of secrecy from Adolf Hitler's so-called Peoples Tribunal (TIME, May 14). The P. T. stands for that "New Justice" which Nazis have proudly placed above the German Supreme Court. Judges on the P. T. bench are all personal appointees of Realmleader Hitler. Five are aviators with no previous legal experience. The P. T. operates on the neo-Nazi principle that all proceedings before it are State secrets. No reporters or spectators are admitted. The charge against the accused is a secret which may not be divulged.

Such New Justice is of tantalizing interest to exponents of Old Justice. Last week they prepared to follow every detail of the Roiderer case, which had become rather public because the U. S. Embassy insisted upon knowing something about what was happening to the accused U. S. citizen. As a special favor German Minister of Interior Dr. Wilhelm Frick authorized U. S. Consul Raymond H. Geist to be present at the trial in Berlin.

Consul Geist was told that Prisoner Roiderer had been brought from Munich to Berlin's famed prison for political offenders, Moabit. Down to Moabit went Consul Geist. "No such prisoner is here," he was told. After calling on various Nazi officials, the U. S. Consul was finally told, "It is very doubtful whether Richard Roiderer has been brought to Moabit."

"Then where is he?" demanded Consul Geist, receiving for answer a characteristic froglike stare. Accustomed to this, as are all consuls in Germany, Mr. Geist pursued his search, could not find Prisoner Roiderer last week in the curious morass of the New Justice.

Off the Record, correspondents gleaned from Nazi officials what seemed to be facts:

The State did not dispute last week that Prisoner Roiderer is a bona fide U. S. citizen, born in Bavaria in 1894, naturalized in Cleveland in 1922. Nonetheless the German State contends that this U. S. citizen could and did commit high treason against the German Reich. Such a crime is possible only under the New Justice. Outside Nazidom it is a basic legal axiom that no man can commit treason against a country not his own.

It was treason to Germany, the State contended last week, for Cleveland's Roiderer to write down in a notebook while in Germany last spring what he saw of the brownshirt S. A. Storm Troops and black-jacketed S. S. Special Guard. Though Adolf Hitler has said a thousand times that both organizations are nonmilitary, Richard Roiderer's notebook jottings were classed as "military secrets" which he was suspected of intending to divulge to a foreign power.