Black Guard Isms

A sexy, Jew-hating, frankly brutal sheet is Das Schwarze Korps (the Black Guard), official organ of Nazi Germany's blackshirt, elite SS Guards. Publisher is Heinrich Himmler, Gestapo chief. Its editor is blond, cold, handsome Gunter d'Alquen, 29, a onetime newspaperman on Berlin's important Voelkischer Beobachter.

Unlike Julius Streicher's thick-lipped Der Stuermer, Das Schwarze Korps is not out to drum up low-grade circulation. Rather, it teaches young Nazi troopers to believe in the destiny of a German master race. To give his theory a "scientific" background, Publisher Himmler maintains a large research staff which analyzes and breaks down into racial groups the gallons of human blood it has collected. The staff's novel "findings" are usually aired in Das Schwarze Korps.

Scarcely a week goes by without the newsorgan advocating the favorite Himmler thesis of a free love that will promote the birth of more illegitimate "children of good blood." Last week, for instance, Das Schwarze Korps plugged for artificial insemination of childless women. Wrote Editor d'Alquen: "The problem is to find a helper toward procreation . . . who will place his hereditary substance at [their] disposal." The SS publication cribbed from the ancient Spartan Code of Lycurgus by recommending that impotent husbands choose their brothers to impregnate fertile brides.

But that was fairly old stuff. Later in the week Das Schwarze Korps clicked its heels again and did better with a brand-new patriotic ism. Discarding the long-proclaimed Nazi thesis that the English were racially first cousins to the Germans, Himmler's theorists announced that actually the English were "white Jews" and that British "Protestantism" was after all only a modern version of the "old Jewish law book.'5 "This theory," conceded the paper, "is, of course, too novel to be immediately grasped by everyone. We have been far too accustomed to regard England as we would like it to be. Thus we honor Shakespeare as we would a German classical poet, overlooking the fact that the very qualities that we admire in him made him a poor example of Englishman. . . .

"Experience has taught us that Latin peoples, yes, even the peoples of distant Japan, are incomparably closer to us in their attitude toward life and philosophy than our 'Germanic cousins' on the British Isles." But while Germany gained a theory it lost a favorite old slogan: "Gott strafe England!" The argument: "If God, on whom the Germans called in vain 25 years ago was really capable of exercising such a measure of punitive power, He would not have waited till 1940 to punish the British," stated the paper. "In those days the Germans relied too much on the power of higher justice and too little on the holy wrath of the nation fighting for its existence.

"Slogans such as this derive from a mental attitude which is all too fatalistic and all too lazy. ... If He were really a practical God who would see to it that law and order prevail, He would have said to Himself long since: I have made things hard for the Germans long enough--now they will finally have some good luck. And in a like vein: the British have irritated Me long enough--now they will learn what trouble is."

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