"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 Muelhausen 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 Fuehrer'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 Oberbuerger-meister (Lord Mayor) of Leipzig, and Price Controller of the Reich under Brueming 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 Goetterdaemmerung, Goerdeler's disappearance could just as well be a cryptic Nazi dodge to serve some cryptic Nazi purpose.

Terror, if not disaffection, seethed even beyond the German frontiers. One day last week Baron Ernst von Weizsaecker, veteran German Ambassador to the Vatican, was reported to have had a long, earnest talk with Pope Pius XII, then repudiated the Nazis. Next day the Embassy repudiated his repudiation. Disaffection was also reported spreading from Russia. A leading Nazi pointed his finger at General Walther von Seidlitz and his Moscow German Officers' Union. Cried garrulous Austrian Gauleiter August Eigruber: Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben had connections with the Moscow Germans. Witzleben was reported to have led the July 20 Putsch against the Nazis, was rumored to be in jail or executed.

More Ranting. At week's end Hitler summoned his sub-Fuehrers to an emergency Party meeting. In breast-beating prose he took up the theme of his old poem:

"I am not afraid to wage battle against outside enemies. . . . But I must have certainty that in the rear there is absolute security, loyal confidence and faithful cooperation. . . . The criminal saboteurs [of July 20] are eliminated. . . . We shall master all difficulties by harnessing the entire military and inner strength of the nation. ... I believe that I am necessary to the nation, that it needs a man who will under no circumstances capitulate. . . . No one else would do that better than I."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.