“4. If the act was committed abroad or was committed in such a manner that the perpetrator undertook to import writings, recordings, or pictures from abroad for the purpose of distribution within the country.” By August 1938, this tendency had progressed to a point where the following acts were all made punishable by death: “1. Whoever openly solicits or incites others to evade the fulfillment of compulsory military service in the German or an allied armed force, or otherwise openly seeks to paralyze or undermine the will of the German people or an allied nation to self-assertion by bearing arms; “2. Whoever undertakes to induce a soldier or conscriptee in the reserves to disobedience, opposition, or violence against a superior, or to desertion or illegal absence or otherwise to undermine the discipline of the German or an allied military force; and “3. Whoever undertakes to cause himself or another to avoid the fulfillment of military service entirely, or to a limited extent, or temporarily, by means of self-mutilation, or by means designed to deceive or by other methods.”[23] But the Nazi jurists were not content to sharpen the letter of the penal laws; they subverted the spirit and method of interpretation of the criminal law in order to enable the courts to impose punishment, outside the law, in accordance with the political ideology of the regime. Thus, in June 1935, article 2 of the penal code was amended to read as follows: “Whoever commits an act which the law declares as punishable or which deserves punishment according to the fundamental idea of a penal law or the sound sentiment of the people, shall be punished. If no specific penal law can be directly applied to this act, then it shall be punished according to the law whose underlying spirit can be most readily applied to the act.”[24] At the same time, the following articles were added to the code of criminal procedure: “Article 170a--If an act deserves punishment according to the sound sentiment of the people, but is not declared punishable in the code, the prosecution must investigate whether the underlying principle of a penal law can be applied to the act and whether justice can be helped to triumph by the proper application of this penal law. “Article 267a--If the main proceedings show that the defendant committed an act which deserves punishment according to the sound sentiment of the people, but which is not declared punishable by the law, then the court must investigate whether the underlying principle of a penal law applies to this act and whether justice can be helped to triumph by the proper application of this penal law.”[25] And, simultaneously, the Reich Supreme Court was ordered to set aside its prior decisions in order to bring the law into conformance with the ideology of the Third Reich. The decree is as follows: