Abstract

Issues and Men

The blood-bath in Germany by means of which German ruler Adolf Hitler has "purged his party" of its alleged mutineers-as to whose guilt no evidence has as yet been allowed to reach the outer world-cannot fail to do the German people harm wherever the news of it is read. For, as The Nation has said, those horrible reports cannot be laid at the doors of Jewish libelers or foreign enemies; fifty deaths are now officially admitted, which means that the actual number must be very much larger. This standing up and shooting after three-minute trials of leaders who the clay before were among the elect of the Hitlerites, or the outright murder of others like General von Schicicher and his wife, we might expect in a Balkan state or in a South American revolution, but never in a country which boasts of its high Kultur and its civilization.