Psychic Justice

Criminologists, prison wardens, managers of insane asylums and keepers of houses of correction from 50 countries arrived expectantly last week in Berlin. On Sept. 1 a new Nazi-made penal code becomes effective throughout Germany (TIME, July 8). Eager to explain it, Nazis were lavish hosts last week to the eleventh International Penal & Penitentiary Conference.

In the lobbies Nazi jurists seemed confident that, with President Roosevelt and his New Dealers twisting the tail of old-time constitutional Justice, the U. S. delegates in Berlin would be the first to sympathize with rough & ready Nazi methods. They noted, for example, that U. S. citizens who committed no crime when they bought gold have since been made liable to punishment for holding on to their purchases. Taking the rostrum last week, German Minister of Justice Franz Giirtner announced that after Sept. 1 the punishment of "wrong acts" which were not crimes when they were commit ted will be a regular feature of German Justice.

Said Dr. Giirtner: "We have substituted for the outworn maxim nulla poena sine lege ('no punishment unless law has been infringed') the more efficacious nulla crimen sine poena ('no crime left unpunished'), regardless of whether or not law has been infringed." "For the German judge as for the private citizen," continued the Minister of Justice, "the Nazi philosophy of life will be the guiding light. . . . Every clause in the penal code will have a 'danger zone.' Whoever moves in this sphere will do so at his own risk. . . . Wrong may exist, accordingly, in the Germany of the future, even where there is no law providing a punishment. No one must be lucky enough to slip through the meshes of the law!"

Meeting in advance the obvious objection that under such a system each judge will have to make up what is right and wrong as he goes along, Dr. Giirtner weightily declared: "The judge, basing himself on the popular conception of what is right, will obtain an unerringly accurate sense as to what may or may not legally be done. . . . Moreover Realmleader Hitler is ceaselessly endeavoring to be an embodied expression of the people's will. Thus a judge can find in the will of the Realmleader a guiding light to aid him in his own task."

Pestered by Nazi newshawks for opinions on this speech, most Conference delegates discreetly praised its "frankness." Off the record, to correspondents of their own nationality, they said that Germany had been unmasked by her Minister of Justice in the act of creating a penal code which had little to do with Justice as that term is understood by Anglo-Saxons. The split between Germany and her penologist guests appeared to them so wide that a majority resolved informally to remain silent and enter no discussion. They noted with upped eyebrows that Dr. Gurtner called explicitly for "severity in the treatment of prisoners so that the punishment may be appropriate to the evil." This German reversion to an eye for an eye & a tooth for a tooth caused Sing Sing Warden Lewis E. Lawes to break the delegates' self-imposed rule of silence. "I certainly disagree," said Mr. Lawes, "with any policy of taking vengeance on prisoners."

Next day the German delegation, backing Dutch Judge Nathan Muller of Amsterdam, went on record as favoring "punishment rather than education" in penal institutions. Belgian and Spanish jurists read papers sharply criticizing Nazi prison camps. These speeches the German hosts of the Conference left untranslated, supplied French and English translations of rebuttal speeches in which Germans praised penal camps.

Finally Nazi speakers got around to denouncing such instruments as the U. S. Constitution with its guarantees of basic rights and liberties. Boomed sonorous Undersecretary of Justice Dr. Roland Freisler: "This German State, in which Justice rules in fact, requires no formal guarantee of Liberty!"

Verging extremely close to the Red Russian doctrine that abortion and even murder are not great crimes unless so committed as to harm the State, Dr. Freisler roared: "We now regard abortion not as a species of manslaughter but as an offense against the national power of reproduction!"

Seeking to turn the Conference into a rubber stamp endorsement of Nazi penal methods, the German hosts insisted that votes be counted on a basis of delegates, not nations. With 50 nations represented, the 148 German delegates repeatedly won over the unanimous opposing votes of the other 49 nations. Thus German papers were able to inform German readers truthfully that virtually the whole Nazi system of arbitrary arrest, physical punishment of prisoners and sterilization by court order had been approved by a majority of an international conference. In a fiery address to the Congress. Minister of Propaganda & Public Enlightenment Paul Josef Goebbels declared that the Nazi State is "an aristocratic democracy which dares to tell the truth! If it is true Democracy to lead a nation and show it the way to Work and Peace, then I believe that Democracy has been realized in Germany."

So boiling mad were the non-German delegates on the last day that the Eleventh International Penal and Penitentiary Conference broke up without being able to agree on where the Twelfth Congress is to meet in 1940.

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