Word: torgler
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...they proceeded to erect the totalitarian state based on scrupulous unfairness. But now, obeying an incongruous twirk of conscience, they have decided to use legal processes to discover and convict those they accuse of the crime. This was a mistake. For the legal process has enabled the real defendants--Torgler, Dmitroff, and Teneff--to demonstrate quite conclusively that only if sudden insanity had seized them would they even have conceived the idea of burning the Reichstag, and that as a matter of strict fact it was physically impossible, none of them having been near the place within hours...
...before he got them all into trouble. Judge Bünger finally granted him permission to submit testimony later and provide sworn statements from witnesses afraid to appear. From every point of view it was unfortunate that the defendants at the trial were not more articulate. Only one, Ernst Torgler, was German. He cried: "I am fully innocent. ... I have been in jail for seven months, five of which I was chained day and night and compelled to live in en forced silence." Dim-witted Defendant van der Lubbe could scarcely speak German. Two of the Bulgarian defend ants could...
...scheduled for this week a great trial before the German Supreme Court at Leipzig of five men charged with arson and high treason. Supposed to have thrown the brand was one Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutchman whom the Nazis call a Communist. The other four prisoners were Ernst Torgler, a German Communist leader, and three Bulgarian Communists. But last week in London, Germany's trial was being deflated into an anticlimax by one of the strangest trials in history...
...witness placed Ernst Torgler in a Friedrichstrasse restaurant on the night of the fire and completely discredited van der Lubbe's Communist standing. They described the latter as "weak, vainglorious, partially blind and frequently in debt." German Communist leaders claimed they had never heard of van der Lubbe until he was arrested running out of the Reichstag during the fire. An anonymous witness declared that van der Lubbe was an intimate of famed Nazi Captain Ernst Roehm...
...Down with von Papen's Starvation Cabinet!" wound up Herr Torgler, then presented a motion of no confidence on the issue of the President's decree...