waldek.usa
21.02.10, 05:30
Baroness Beheaded.
There was scarcely a word in the papers. No one would mention it by telephone
or letter, yet everywhere that Germans met last week, behind locked doors
where no servants could hear, they talked of nothing else. What had happened
to the beautiful Baroness von Berg? Would she be beheaded? Had she already
been executed? Was Baron Sosnowski in jail? Had he been sent back to Poland?
For a year details of the story have been leaking out (TIME, Nov. 19). Baron
George ("Yurek") Sosnowski is an extremely handsome young Pole who served
gallantly in the Austrian Army, loves women, excitement. Deeply infatuated
with him was the beautiful Baroness Benita von Berg, a blonde whose first
husband was Richard von Falkenhayn, son of the late great General von
Falkenhayn. Berlin society knew that it was to escape the influence of Polish
Baron Sosnowski that beauteous, divorced Benita married stolid Baron von Berg.
Curiously, all four remained friendly, all went to the same parties.
Sosnowski's parties were enough to set Berlin gossips hissing like snakes.
People not invited insisted that there were buckets of champagne, sexual orgies.
About a year ago the mother of a Frau von Natzmer, well-born German girl
serving as a secretary in the Ministry of Defense, went to the Ministry to
complain that her daughter was being made to work too late at night. The
official whose secretary she was knew that she had done very little overtime
work. He reported the matter to Nazidom's secret police.
Last February Baron Sosnowski gave another party, officially for his latest
protegee, a dancer. Berlin's half-world knew what to expect. With glittering
eyes they hurried to his apartment. This time a whole cordon of secret police
were waiting at the door. Many times had the Baron Sosnowski been suspected of
espionage. No charge ever stuck. He blamed his luck on a curious signet ring
that he always wore. Several weeks before this last party he lost his ring
pulling the Baroness von Berg's puppy from a canal.
All the guests, over 50, were rushed to jail, many of them kept there for days
without a chance to change the evening clothes that they had come in. Then the
weeding out started. One of the first to be released was Baroness von Berg's
first husband, von Falkenhayn. He turned out to be a member of the secret
police himself.
As iron Nazi secrecy clamped down, the Sosnowski case became a lurid legend,
strictly censored in the German Press, totally baffling to correspondents
until they were able to tell the U. S. Embassy that languishing in jail and
possibly about to be beheaded for "treason" was an inoffensive young U. S.
music student, Miss Isobel Lillian Steele. Diplomatic pressure forced Germany
to disgorge Miss Steele (TIME, Jan. 7), even the secret police finally
admitting that she was guilty of nothing. But the music student had been
innocently acquainted with Baroness von Berg, proceeded to spill all sorts of
Sosnowski facts, and is now hard at work in a Manhattan hotel dashing off
Sosnowskiana for tabloids and writing a book.
In Berlin last week the Sosnowski case finally reached its grim denouement
before the People's Court. This is packed exclusively with Hitler appointees,
five of them aviators. Only the Realmleader can alter its judgments, which
take precedence over the German Supreme Court, kicked by Nazi New Justice into
discard. Normally the People's Court lets its sentences of death be known only
after the guilty heads have been chopped. Last week by a great exception
underground Berlin grapevines got out word that the Court had sentenced
Baroness von Berg and Frau von Natzmer to death, had let off with life
imprisonment Baron Sosnowski and two unnamed female employees of the Defense
Ministry. Only one question remained, would the two doomed German women die by
the Nazi ax, or by the method to which spies are traditionally privileged, a
firing squad?
To find out anything whatever at Plotzensee Prison, even when correspondents
arrived armed with official passes, proved almost impossible. Not until the
enormous prison hearse drew up and two bodies were slid in, would anyone
reconstruct what had been done in the cold, misty dawn.
"They were shot," said officials at first, then "They were beheaded."
Accustomed to such bare-faced lies, the newshawks patiently pecked for
details, finally satisfied themselves that an axing had occurred. With the
backs of their heads shaved bald, the Baroness von Berg and Frau von Natzmer
were led in coarse, nondescript prison garb to the blood-caked block from
which so many heads now roll in the sawdust. The headsman, incongruous in his
yellowish celluloid shirtfront, his old silk hat and his red-spotted tailcoat,
raised the gleaming ax. Twice it swished down to sever a lovely neck and send
the blood of a German woman spouting high. According to Nazis, the Baroness
von Berg was the first female aristocrat to lose her head to their New Justice.
