idea, the inspiring idea, and the youth does not finally storm the gates, then it will not become the avant-garde of the republic, but the cudgel-guard of the partycrats, and their interests will be defended foremost, not the republic...And the effect? The Reichsbanner honours the constitution with festivals; the Reichsbanner goose-steps; the Reichsbanner drapes Potsdam in black-red-gold; the Reichsbanner scrapes with the Communists and Fechenbach sits in the penitentiary. That is the joke of it. But if the Reichsbanner had as many determined fellows among its members as Captain Erhardt, then Fechenbach would no longer be sitting in the penitentiary today. French democrats rescued their Spanish brothers in the cause, whom they did not even know by sight, from the claws of a dictator. The thought of an injustice committed somewhere in the world kept them from sleeping. The German democrats and socialists are more solidly organized. It is not at all true that they are as weak-kneed as is always believed; it is just that they have terribly thick skin. Besides, they are faithful to the law and to the constitution. To rescue someone from prison-that would mean acting against the law! God forbid! And Fechenbach sits in the penitentiary. In 1927, Ossietzky succeeded Kurt Tucholsky as editor-in-chief of the periodical Die Weltbühne. In 1932, he supported Ernst Thälmann's candidacy for the German presidency, though still a critic of the actual policy of the German Communist Party and the Soviet Union. Abteilung M affair In 1929, Walter Kreiser, one of the writers for Die Weltbühne, published an exposé of the training of a special air unit of the Reichswehr, referred to as Abteilung M (Section M), which was secretly training in Germany and in Soviet Russia, in violation of Germany's agreements under the Treaty of Versailles. Kreiser and Ossietzky, the paper's editor, were questioned by a magistrate of the Supreme Court about the article later that year and were finally indicted in early 1931 for "treason and espionage", the assertion being that they had drawn international attention to state affairs which the state had purposefully attempted to keep secret. The arrests were widely seen at the time as an effort to silence Die Weltbühne, which had been a vocal critic of the Reichswehr's policies and secret expansion. Counsel for the defendants pointed out that the information they had published was true and more to the point that the budgeting