Foreign News: Stoogettes & Neuter

Relatives of Germans beheaded nowadays usually receive a sealed Nazi urn supposed to contain the ashes. Last week perhaps because she came of one of Prussia’s first fighting families, Nazis did not cremate the remains of beauteous Baroness Benita von Falkenhayn, who lost her head fortnight ago while Polish Baron George Sosnowski, her master in amours and spying, was let off with life imprisonment.

Six aristocratic relatives followed the sealed black coffin across Berlin’s swank Kaiserwilhelm Cemetery. The grave had been dug next to the mausoleum of the family of a distant relative, Baron Manfred von Richthofen, the ace of aces of Imperial Germany. Though there is generally no parson at such funerals, a Protestant pastor was permitted to officiate. Meanwhile all Berlin gaped at scarlet and black posters stuck up everywhere in which Adolf Hitler pointedly emphasized the obvious fact that he had refused to save from beheading Baroness von Falkenhayn and the other beauteous spy who was beheaded with her, aristocratic Frau Renate von Natzmer.

Why this peculiar scarlet emphasis by Der Reichsführer upon his refusal of mercy to two women? In an effort to explain, an excited editor of the New York Daily News conjectured that evidently Adolf Hitler is no “pervert like some of his pals but . . . he is merely a neuter—a being who is apparently devoid of any sex feelings at all. . . . Hitler didn’t execute the alleged head of this particular spy plot, the Polish Baron Sosnowski. . . . He was simply afraid to do that, in view of reprisals that would surely be taken in Poland. He had to content himself with taking two of the boss spy’s poor little stoogettes, chopping off their heads. . . . This barbarity seems to indicate that Hitler has become a hater of women, a persecutor of them. . . .”

The Stoogette Baroness, according to leaks from Berlin’s People’s Court last week, flung out her arms toward Spy Sosnowski when she was sentenced to be beheaded, crying, “George, save me!” Other leaks revealed Baron Sosnowski as engaged in Polish counterespionage, credited him with having exposed 54 Nazi spies who have been caught in foreign countries. That the Baron had been exchanged or would soon be exchanged for some of these Nazi spies, few doubted. According to the Warsaw correspondent of London’s Daily Express, Baron Sosnowski stepped off a wagon-lit in Warsaw last week, was greeted with caresses by a Polish blonde three days after his German stoogettes were beheaded.

As newsorgans throughout the world denounced Der Reichsführer, wiseacres predicted that the furore would cause him to pardon somebody. Obliging Herr Hitler promptly fulfilled this prophecy, used his powers for the first time to prevent a beheading, saved and sent to 15 years imprisonment no woman but a man, one Bernard Pischon, sentenced to death for shooting a Storm Trooper.