GERMANY: Never, Never, Never!

I have chosen the struggle,

Have bound myself to it,

Witt stay faithful to it,

Until earth covers me.

That they may kill my friends

Is possible.

That they should kill me

Is also possible.

That we should capitulate:

Never, never, never!

Some 20 years ago Adolf Hitler penned this never-never verse. Last week the Mülhausen Tageblatt reprinted it as a warning to cynical, frightened Germany.

Its ten implacable lines set the tone for the bloody terror that still racked the Reich a fortnight after Claus von Stauffenberg planted a bomb under the Führer's table and blew the crisis between the Nazi Party and the Army officers wide open.

More Purge. To sweep clean the ranks of his disaffected generals Adolf Hitler needed an iron broom. He found one in the persons of Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of Supreme High Command, and Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, a Prussian and a Junker. As head of a newly created Military Court of Honor, the two Field Marshals last week reported their first batch of Army sweepings: four of their fellow officers executed; four dead by suicide; two "deserted to the Bolsheviki"; twelve slated for "elimination" from the Army; many more about to be tried.

But Hitler was merely using the Wehrmacht Court of Honor to humble the Wehrmacht. For the proud officers whom Keitel, Rundstedt and their colleagues indicted, the Nazis had developed a special humiliation: they were to be handed over for trial to a Nazi People's Court.

More Defection. The grim politics of liquidation would not stop with the Wehrmacht. For the first time the Nazis announced that disaffection had spread beyond ,the Army. Cried Hans Fritzsche, political editor of the German radio: "It has now been established that the German Army, representatives of German industry and conservative politicians of the old school all were involved in the peace movement against Hitler. ... It is certainly to be regretted. . . ."

Promptly the Gestapo clapped a price of 1,000,000 marks on the head of Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, longtime Oberbürger-meister (Lord Mayor) of Leipzig, and Price Controller of the Reich under Brüming and again in the first years of Nazidom. A confidant of industrialists, old Reichswehr officers and big-shot civil servants, Goerdeler was linked with" a nationalist underground involving Financial Wizard Hjalmar Schacht. Goerdeler vanished on the day the Gestapo tried to pick him up. This might be a sign of the extent and organization of the anti-Nazi group. But in the dissolving nightmare of the Nazi Götterdämmerung, Goerdeler's disappearance could just as well be a cryptic Nazi dodge to serve some cryptic Nazi purpose.