The Beer-Cellar Affair
Herr Himmler and his Gestapo are doing everything in their power to convert the bomb outrage in the Munich beer-cellar from tragedy into farce. The allegation, broad- cast within an hour or two of the explosion, that the authors were the British Secret Service, was too grotesque to survive even in Germany. It was therefore superseded by the announcement that the outrage was arranged as long ago as August, when a suspicious workman (information regard- ing whose identity and whereabouts is earnestly desired) was seen moving about the beer-cellar, doubtless with a view to placing the bomb where it is now said to have been discovered, in the head of a pillar in the hall in which Herr Hitler spoke. Discovery does not stop at that. The Gestapo has satisfied itself that bombs can be timed as long as six months in advance to go off at any precise moment desired. And if it be asked how the person who set the bomb in August knew that Herr Hitler (whose appearance at Munich on that evening was totally unexpected) would be speaking in the beer-cellar at 9.3o on November 8th, the answer is no doubt twofold. Normally Herr Hitler is present at these annual commemorations of the 1923 putsch, and in any case to assume some kind of psychic prescience on the criminal's part is little more far-fetched than to assume a bomb which can be set to the minute cix months before. An article on a later page adduces reasons for concluding that the whole affair was arranged, on Reichstag fire lines, by the Gestapo itself. That is the conclusion which seems to command most credence in neutral countries.
