Prisoner

Vigorously denied by Nazi police last week was the report that their No. 1 Prisoner, former Austrian Chancellor Dr. Kurt von Schuschnigg, is so broken in health that he cannot be brought to trial. Prisoner Schuschnigg is in a "depressed state," the police admitted, but he will be tried in a few months before a special court on the charge of violating the Austrian Constitution. Likely sentence: Exile. "Germany's dignity," soberly cracked the police, would not allow his execution or sentence to a long jail term.

Meanwhile from Paris came the first detailed account of Dr. Schuschnigg's six-month confinement. According to Dr. Martin Fuchs, former Austrian Charge d'Affaires in Paris and friend of the jailed Chancellor, Dr. Schuschnigg is now held in a tiny bedroom under the eaves of Vienna's Hotel Metropole, a stuffy, ten-foot-square cell containing only a bed, table, chair and a burly Storm Trooper who never leaves the room. "He has altered in appearance terribly. He is emaciated. His eyes are haggard. They will not let him have a razor so he has grown a tangled beard. He is obsessed with a terrible fear that he will lose his mind. He is convinced that he will never leave his prison alive."

His only visitor is his wife, the former Countess Vera Fugger von Babenhausen, whom he married by proxy while imprisoned (TIME, June 13).* She takes him fresh linen every Friday. Dr. Fuchs explained that of course Gestapo agents have combed Kurt Schuschnigg's accounts, intimate letters and diplomatic correspondence in search of evidence to support the charges against him, and that a peculiarly ingenious device has been invented to break his will: Twice a day Prisoner Schuschnigg is forced to listen to the voices of Adolf Hitler and Propaganda Minister Goebbels, vilifying him at the top of their lungs, from phonograph records.

* Up to now the Nazis have denied the marriage has been countenanced.

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