Hemlock & Pillory

Under his now unlimited powers as Realmleader, Adolf Hitler prepared last week to give the Fatherland a penal code sharply revised ''to conform with Nazi ideals of jurisprudence."

No jurist and lacking even a high school diploma, the intuitive Chancellor some months ago ordered Minister of Justice Franz Guertner to produce concrete suggestions. Last week Dr. Guertner advised Herr Hitler that the revised code should:

P:Empower judges to impose "in preference to heavy fines, sentences confiscating the entire property of the guilty."

P:Extend the right of dueling, already granted by Chancellor Hitler to German university students (TIME, April 17.1933) to the entire male population as "a worthy form of settling disputes between men."

P: Give Germans condemned to death the right to take their own lives as the Greeks gave Socrates a bowl of hemlock. In the modern Nazi State the procedure recommended last week is for the German jailor to enter the cell of the condemned and say, "Here is a pistol and a bottle of poison. Take your choice." According to the Ministry of Justice, "Criminals of the fouler sort should not, of course, receive this privilege. They should be decapitated, as at present. The theory of permitting a man to carry out his own sentence is the logical fulfillment of the idea that the last wish of a person condemned to death should be granted."

P:Revive the ancient Roman pillory by ostracism in "symbolic modern form" by allowing judges to order pictures of malefactors to be flashed on cinema screens and their names shouted over the radio while their misdeeds are denounced.

P: Abolish the procedure which sent Adolf Hitler not to jail but to "detention in a fortress" after the failure of his seditious beer hall Putsch in 1923. According to the Ministry of Justice "Detention in a fortress can scarcely be continued, since in the totalitarian State neither the seditionist nor the traitor can very well receive honorable detention."

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