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.

Under Realmleader Hitler's famed decree of New Justice setting up the Peoples Tribunal "anyone who betrays a State secret will be punished with Death. If the offender is a foreigner, life-long imprisonment may be substituted."

Thus far no foreigner has met either fate. Just as everything seemed set to arraign a foreign traitor before Germany's P. T., courage has always failed the Nazi officials concerned. Last week Cleveland's Musical Thinker had better than an even chance of being packed out of the Fatherland by arbitrary Nazi order instead of standing trial.

Meanwhile Prisoner Roiderer's old mother lay in a cheap German sanatorium. Widow of a petty German official, she used to live on his pension in Cleveland. When Nazis, because of exchange restrictions, refused to send the pension to Cleveland, Mother & Son Roiderer moved back to the Fatherland. Since the pension Mother Roiderer now receives is a mere pittance, Son Roiderer taught English in Munich to eke out a living before his arrest. The last time he was visited in Munich by the local U. S. Consul, Prisoner Roiderer begged: "Tell mother not to waste any of her money on a lawyer for me. She needs every pfennig she has."

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