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Prisoner Valentin P. Olberg took first honors with a confession that students at the Gorki Institute had been supplied by him with mimeographed copies of a plan of his own devising. The Olberg plan: one of the Institute's professors was to make up in the chemical laboratory bombs which students were to explode when reviewed by Stalin in Moscow on May Day 1936, blow up themselves and the entire Soviet Government who would be on the platform.
Other prisoners brought out that Zinoviev had cried, "it is an honor to kill Stalin!" and had claimed this honor for his own wing of the alleged conspiracy.
Trotsky's son Syedov was called a money-passer. One of the prisoners said the conspirators in Moscow had given him to be carried to Syedov Trotsky in Berlin a copy of The Arabian Nights. "It served in some way which I do not remember as a secret code book," finished up Prisoner Holzmann, scratching his head with a puzzled air.
Prisoner Fritz David, said to be a German, confessed that at the 1935 Comintern Congress he sat in a box clutching in his pocket a pistol with which to shoot Stalin. "The chance did not come, however," added David. "Police were in the same box with me." Over & over Kamenev, Zinoviev and other prisoners got around to confessing in various ways that their purpose as conspirators was simply to kill Russia's pres-ent rulers and become masters of the State themselves, with no program in mind as to how they would run Russia, and no smallest criticism at the trial last week of anything ever done by Joseph Stalin.
In every confession the Dictator figured as the embodiment of perfection—except that all the prisoners wanted to kill him.
"I am happy that there is a Stalin and that he will continue to lead the country!" cried Prisoner Sergei Mrachkovsky, gilding the lily. Even this was capped by Prisoner Kamenev whose second and final lecture at the trial was a deliberate incitement to Communists abroad to go and assassinate Trotsky. "Zinoviev and I are dead!" cried Kamenev. "Trotsky remains the only person to guide terroristic activities against Stalin. The sooner his hands are checked the better." Judge Ulrich, who has the reputation of having handed out more Death sentences than any other jurist in the world, left the court to cogitate with his three assistant judges for seven hours, returned to deliver the verdict: all 16 prisoners were to be shot "within 72 hours," subject to the remote possibility of an overriding decree of clemency by the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Union. From Brussels, the Second (Socialist) International dispatched to the Third (Communist) International at Moscow a vigorous message protesting that the prisoners had not in fact been defended in court. This was de' nounced by the official Moscow party organ Pravda as "impertinent." With all clemency refused and before a second sun had set, all 16 prisoners were shot dead by a firing squad.
Significance. At the opening of the trial great interest focused on Prosecutor Vishinsky's blanket charge that the prisoners had operated hand-in-glove with Nazi agents and explicitly with those of Supreme Chief of the German Police Forces Herr Heinrich Himmler. Once this Mrs. de Vries (arrow) .