The Black Days

Among the opportunists, perverts, gangsters and men of distorted genius who rose to power in Hitler's Germany, Dr. Robert Ley was an exception. The boss of Germany's Labor Front was a rather ordinary little man, fond of his bottle and frantically fervent in his adulation of Hitler and Naziism. "National Socialism has made an end to the bone-softening doctrine of life negation," he once said. "Germans are fanatics of life." When he was arrested last May, he moaned: "Life [without Hitler] does not mean a damn thing to me."

He meant what he said. One evening last week, in his war criminal's cell at Nuernberg, Robert Ley hanged himself.

He left a testament to "My German People." It told them that their worst mistake had been antiSemitism, counseled them to make amends: "The Jew should make a friend out of Germany and Germany a friend out of the Jew." He also gave his reason for suicide. "I was with Hitler in the good days . . . and I want to be with him now in the black days."

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