All Justice Is Gone in Hindenburg's Name

"Alles Recht ist dahin in Hindenburg's Namen" was an entry in the diary of Engelbert Krebs, a priest, philanthropist, and professor of theology at Freiburg's University, on July 21, 1933. Needless to say, under the Nazi regime, Krebs lost his venia legendi in 1936 and was forced into retirement in 1937.

The above citation was on the most exciting slide that physicist Professor Werner Heiland showed during his talk at the Stube (parlor) of the Breisgau Geschichtsverein (historical society) Schau-ins-Land last Monday. However, the catch title of Heiland's presentation was "Engelbert Krebs and the atomic bomb."

In fact, the physicist Karl Wirz, Krebs's nephew, had sent a letter to his uncle, morally condemning the bomb after the war. For me, it is still a mystery that the US should not have known that the German efforts to build a bomb were nil. In fact, a conspiracy theory claims that this information was well-known but deliberately withheld from the scientists working on the Manhattan Project. The aim was to keep them on board because many project members had moral scruples in building the US atomic bomb.

Instead of the bomb, Professor Heiland, who wrote a biography of Engelbert Krebs, talked at length about the family and non-family relations Krebs maintained before and during the Third Reich.

Krebs, associated with the Zentrum, the Catholic party in the Weimar Republic, was bitterly opposed to Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen's treachery, which he called a putsch with Hindenburg's consent, the president of the Reich. Although Krebs named the Nazis somehow belittlingly Hitlerianer, they had already seized full power by June 1933. So it is strange when on July 21, Krebs was still referring to World War I hero Hindenburg, an old man of 86, when he writes, "The saber rules, the lie of betrayal - in the name of Hindenburg! The worst thing that has come over Germany since 1918! Oh, God! "

The worst? The worst was still to come.

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