GERMANY: Three Against Hitler

(See front cover)

Fighting every inch of the way, three men stood out against the advance of Fascism in Germany last week: pale, bespectacled Chancellor Heinrich Bruning; white-haired Paul von Hindenburg; and their faithful lieutenant, Minister of the Interior and of War Wilhelm Groener. Each morning foreign correspondents in Berlin expected the Bruning Government to fall and Fascist Adolf Hitler, who only fortnight ago pounded a platform and shouted in his best Mussolini manner “Right goes hand in hand with Might!”, to seize the Government. Municipal elections were held in Stuttgart. Hitlerites nearly doubled their previous vote. The provincial diets of Oldenburg, Brunswick and Hesse were all Hitler-controlled. Adolf Hitler sat in Berlin giving press interviews as though he were already Chief of State. In Leipzig a congress of pharmacists and physicians turned into a typical Fascist rally. Hitlerite orators, drunk with the sound of their own voices, shouted their program to maintain the superiority of “the Nordic race, the finest flower on the tree of humanity.” They mentioned the hanging of Marxists, abolition of trade unions, compulsory sterilization of Jews.

The Brüning-Hindenburg-Groener triumvirate have faced almost monthly crises for the past 18 months. One more did not cause them to lose their heads. First move was to issue one more emergency decree described by German correspondents as “the most tremendous effort ever made by a German government to save the German people and economic system.”

The Decree took up 46 pages of the Federal legal gazette. It may be divided into two parts, one containing measures aimed to throttle the spread of Fascism. another of measures to take the place of Nazi promises. Anti-Fascist measures:

1) Three-months imprisonment for any one defaming public officials.

2) Prohibition of all political meetings or outdoor demonstrations until Jan. 2.

3) Prohibition of the wearing of political uniforms of any kind except in homes.

4) Empowering of State authorities to demand the surrender of all firearms.

5) The present curbs on the sale of firearms to be extended to blackjacks, clubs and other blunt instruments.

Political and economic measures included:

1) Reduction of a few taxes, but an increase in the “turnover tax” on all transactions except sales of staple foodstuffs from .85% to 2%.

2) Issuance of new four-pfennig (if) coins.

3) Various degrees of confiscation to prevent the flight of capital abroad.

4) Reduction of the interest rate on security loans from 10% to 9%.

5) Protection of landowners against forced sales by stipulating that no bid less than 70% of the property’s assessed value need be accepted.

6) Interest on bonds, loans, mortgages to be reduced to 6% where it is as high as 8% ; reductions of 25% to 50% on interest rates higher than 8%.

Price Commissioner. Most important of all, Dr. Karl Goerdeler, until last week the little known Burgomaster of Leipzig, was given a post new to capitalist countries. If lawmaking could do it, Chancellor Bruning was bound to reduce living costs in Germany last week. Governmentsalaries were slashed 10%. Wages in private industry were ordered reduced to the Tan 10, 1927 level. House rents were ordered reduced 10% to 15%. Retail prices of standardized articles were ordered reduced 10% and Dr. Goerdeler was appointed Price Commissioner, given autocratic powers to see that these decrees were enforced.

Muzzle. The Bruning Dictatorship did not stop its attack on the Hitler advance there. Adolf Hitler was scheduled to make a radio address to the U. S. The German Government forbade it. Prussian Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Karl Severing was called into consultation; a lengthy meeting was held to decide whether the Government dared expel Fascist Hitler from Germany without bringing on the long-feared revolution.

Der Führer-Foreign correspondents are prone to make too much of the fact that Adolf Hitler was born in Austria, that he has never established his right to German citizenship. As a matter of fact Adolf Hitler was born just 62 mi. due east of Munich in the Austrian frontier town of Braunau and always considered himself more Bavarian than Austrian. Fascist Hitler discourages reference to his early life, not because there was anything shameful about it, but merely because it was not sufficiently romantic for Der Führer, the Leader of the Nazis. His father was a customs inspector. Young Adolf was educated in the village school and tried various jobs: housepainting, carpentry, lock-smithery. draughting.

At the beginning of the War he lost his Austrian citizenship by enlisting in the German Army as a private, served with distinction, was once wounded and once gassed. He left the trenches firmly convinced that Germany’s defeat and the breakdown of the Empire were due to the Communists and Jewish profiteers.

In 1922 he first emerged as a political figure in Catholic, reactionary Munich. Small, sparse Adolf Hitler with the little mustache and the great, rasping voice had gained the moral and financial support of General Erich Ludendorff, once Germany’s most brilliant commander, already beginning to suffer from the delusions that led him to take up alchemy and the worship of Woden. In Munich the Hitler Brown Shirts first appeared; the Hitler symbol, the ancient swastika; and the Hitler doctrine which included disfranchising Jews, repudiation of the Treaty of Versailles and Reparations; death to all Communists, and the abolition of department stores.

In November 1923 occurred the famous Beer Putsch, when Adolf Hitler in a black frock coat, scowling over his smudge of a mustache, marched into the biggest beer garden in Munich, the “Burgerbraukeller,” and proclaimed the National Socialist Revolution. There was a riot in the Odeonplatz. Adolf Hitler fled to the mountain village of Uffing and took refuge in the cottage of a devoted follower: Ernst Fritz Hanfstaengel, Harvard 1909, one-time Manhattan art dealer.

For his part in the Beer Putsch Adolf Hitler was sentenced to five years in prison, served one. Complacent editors thought that that was the end of Hitlerism. So perhaps it would have been but for the Depression. Adolf Hitler gave thousands of young Germans a chance to escape from reality. Hitlerites had uniforms, brass bands, roaring mass meetings, plenty of free beer. In 1930 when Germany had over 3,000,000 unemployed, Hitler had 6,000,000 followers and with 107 delegates controlled the Reichstag’s second-largest party.

Last week his goal was still in sight. The emergency decree with its Price Commissioner, its arbitrary fixing of interest rates, rents, even doctors’ fees, meant that the Brüning Dictatorship was trying to out-Hitler Hitler. Germany was operating under a system of state capitalism. The experiment might fail any instant. Adolf Hitler sat in Berlin and waited.