"Civic Death"

Wound up to such a pitch that even the medieval headsman's ax, reintroduced by Nazis, has begun to seem tame. German Justice, the official organ of Minister of Justice Dr. Franz Guertner, called last week for a harsher German punishment to be known as "living death."

As propounded by Judge Goertz in this learned organ of German jurisprudence, "the penalty of Living Death should entail impossibility of making wills, exercising of paternal or civil rights, deprivation of nationality, impossibility of engaging in any commercial activity and complete social ostracism, the sentence to be read publicly." As Judge Goertz observes, the Nazi ax has its disadvantages "because the death penalty may establish a continued relationship between the condemned and the public"--martyrdom.

Busy at Leipzig last week drafting the new German Penal Code called for by Adolf Hitler, Judiciary Commissar Hans Frank said it will "contain a new category of punishment, 'Civic Death,' reducing the status of the condemned to that of a permanent outcast." As an afterthought, Dr. Frank recalled that the ancient Huns had a somewhat similar procedure of driving an offender out of the tribe to starve or be eaten by wild beasts. "We are in fact reviving," he observed, "an old German custom."

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