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Germany's population is only one-third Catholic. . . . The Reich will not tolerate any interference with its internal life." Back on the calendar of German courts went the trials of Catholic nuns and priests for violations of the exchange laws diplomatically dropped last summer just before the Olympic Games. None of these came to trial last week, but as a feeler the People's Prosecutor took up the case of Chaplain Joseph Roussaint of Düsseldorf. Effort was made to prove the chaplain the organizer and ringleader of a united Catholic-Communist front. So little evidence of this could be produced that the prosecutor finally demanded 15 years' imprisonment for the less spectacular crime of "consorting with known Communists."
In a death-cell last week in Plötzensee Penitentiary in Berlin sat pale-faced, intellectual Helmuth Hirsch, the 21-year-old Jew who was arrested last December for plotting to kill with a bomb "a high German official" who newshawks quickly assumed was Dictator Hitler. Hirsch declared: "I expect no clemency and I am calm and await death with perfect composure." Less calm was Berlin's U. S. Consul Raymond H. Geist who had gone to great pains to intercede for Prisoner Hirsch on the grounds that, though his family lives in Czechoslovakia, he is a U. S. citizen because his grandfather was. This week U. S. consular officials in Berlin pleaded fervently that Hirsch was under age when he committed the crime, was influenced by others. Because Hirsch has made a full confession they admitted that only "the intervention of Adolf Hitler or some other high official" could save him.