"Like Notes from a Flute"

One of the sharpest thorns in East Germany's Communist hide is a 14-month-old underground organization directed from West Berlin. The Investigating Committee of Free Lawyers of the Soviet Zone was founded by Dr. Theo Friedenau, 39-year-old lawyer, who has a 500,000 East mark Communist price tag on his head. His organization of 3.000 East German lawyers, judges and public officials exposes Soviet zone perversions of justice and tries to frighten Communist officials by reporting their crimes to Friedenau in Berlin.

Friedenau keeps the ever-mounting score for future retribution, never stops telling the Reds about it. A constant flow of warnings from, his typewriter penetrates East Germany. Before the zone's rigged October election, the underground blanketed the countryside with posters and carefully documented pamphlets blasting Red nominees as crooks and stooges. Bald, professorial Lawyer Friedenau, whose black sideburns reach almost to his chin, boasts that as a result of underground activity 70% of East zone finance offices recently refused to enforce Communist directives expropriating business enterprises.

Last week, Friedenau got his best chance yet to nail Red lies when the East German Communists imprisoned seven Thuringian bank officials after a trial at Erfurt on trumped-up charges of "sabotage." Friedenau knew all about it.

For four months he had had in his possession the complete Communist file of the evidence, prepared by the trial's original prosecutor, handsome, 34-year-old Heinz Perscheid, who fled to West Germany last August rather than proceed with the case. Perscheid's dossier was dynamite. It proved that the Red's judicial masquerade was staged to smash the Liberal Democratic Party, to which the defendants belonged, because it had refused to collaborate with the Socialist Unity (Communist) Party. Perscheid had received special tutelage from Fritz Lange, chairman of East Germany's State Control Commission. Perscheid quoted Lange as telling him: "The prosecution and court are our mouthpieces. What we blow into them from the back must come out in front like notes from a flute." Shortly before Perscheid fled, Lange dictated a new and harsher charge sheet, threatened that "the judge who doesn't rule the way we want will be arrested in court as an Anglo-American agent."

The defendants got sentences of from two to 15 years, but East and West Germans, thanks to Perscheid and Friedenau, got a detailed picture of the dress rehearsal for the frame-up.

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