GERMANY: A Million Heils

Once a year half-a-million goose stepping Germans swarm into Nürnberg, “the most German of all German cities,” join with another half-million gaping visitors for the greatest political circus in the world, the seven-day Nazi Party Congress. Days before the Congress opened last week, 550 special trains, seething with black, brown, green-shirted Storm Troopers, Special Guards, Labor Corps, Hitler Youth were pouring into the railway stations, disgorging their loads in the allotted ten minutes time. Shouldering their packs, the military and semimilitary corps clumped away to their temporary homes in 13 miniature tent cities, spread over half-a-million square yards around the medieval town.

Through the week, from freight trains and field kitchens dotted among the tents, food gushed like gravel from a stone-crusher. Into the maws of cooking pots went some 1,500 cows, 7,000 pigs, 1,320,000 pounds of potatoes, 176,000 pounds of vegetables to come out stews and soups for the blond, Aryan party members.

Loudspeakers summoned the populace to the streets night before the Congress opened as doughty Adolf Hitler arrived by plane, drove through the town to the modest little Deutscher Hof, arm bobbing up & down in salute.

To prepare himself spiritually for his grueling week of speeches Der Führer went on the eve of the Congress to Nurnberg’s annual command performance of his favorite opera, a five-hour unabridged performance of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, heard his favorite tenor, soulful-looking Eyvind Lahome (nè plain Victor Johnson of Birmingham, Ala.). Despite Der Fuhrer’s frequent blasts against the U. S. in general, Herr Hitler applauds U. S. Citizen Lahome in particular as the ideal interpreter of Walther the Wagnerian knight, has awarded him the rare State title of Kammersänger. Freely Der Führer admitted last week that a dozen rasping speeches, plus hours standing with right arm rising and falling as the party members passed in review are always a “personal and physical strain,” and he welcomed the cool weather in Nürnberg. “When you keep moving your arm up and down in salute for hours at a stretch, you generate heat,” Hitler laughed. “This continuous movement, coupled with the emotional strain, is very trying in hot weather.”

Ominous Notes. Nurnberg’s week-long spectacle opened with all the traditional ceremony. Twelve thousand sweating delegates sardine-packed the floor of Luitpoldhalle. In the side seats were jammed brown-dressed Nazi nurses, Labor Corps youth. The few scattered civilians stood out like the second thumbs they felt themselves.

As is traditional, the nattily dressed Realmleader entered to the strains of his favorite march, the Badenweiler, minced his way to the speaker’s stand through a lane of Storm Troopers as wave upon wave of throaty cheers thundered down the long hall. As is traditional, apple-cheeked Rudolf Hess, deputy leader, opened the Congress; Julius Streicher, rabid Jew hater, welcomed the Führer and the party members to Nurnberg, Streicher’s own stamping ground. And as is traditional, Hitler did not address the first session, instead sat messiah-like on the haupttribüne while rasping-voiced Adolf Wagner, Munich Nazi leader, read the Fuhrer’s Proclamation. Nazis laud the Proclamation as the coming year’s party program, indicating in vague generalities the German course in foreign, internal affairs.

In his sonorous Bavarian accent, Herr Wagner emphasized Herr Hitler’s main points: 1) He bluntly warned German industrialists that if they cannot speed production to make the Third Reich economically self-sufficient, state capitalism will follow. This sounded more ominous in light of persistent rumors from Berlin last week that Minister of Economics Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, who has kept the Reich going by rabbit-out-of-hat financing, will resign because his economic views differ widely from those of Economic Dictator General Goring. 2) Timed to coincide with the blistering notes exchanged by Russia and Italy over the Mediterranean crises, the Fuhrer’s Proclamation warned that a “community of interests” exists among Germany, Italy, Japan aimed at “safeguarding Europe from chaotic madness” and dedicated to “repelling an attack on the civilized world that today may come in Spain, tomorrow in the East and the day after somewhere else.” 3) Setting up Hitler’s annual wail for Germany’s lost colonies, the Proclamation cried, “In German economic life there is only one problem filling us with sorrow for years to come: the difficulty of supplying food!”

Stupid Democracies. No small feather in the Führer’s bonnet this year was the attendance of virtually the entire Berlin diplomatic corps for a 48-hour flying visit to the Party Congress—hitherto boycotted by democratic diplomats. Noticeable absentees last week, however, were the Papal Nuncio, the Soviet Ambassador. Conspicuous among the foreign envoys were sad-eyed Prentiss Bailey Gilbert, U. S. Charge d’Affaires (who attended over the vehement protest of his chief, vacationing Ambassador to Germany William E. Dodd), who is expected soon to resign, Sir Nevile Meyrick Henderson, British Ambassador, and André François-Poncet, French Ambassador.

No pomp was lavished on these foreign envoys. Housed in sleeping cars in a Nürnberg freight yard, they shared a crude drawing room, had to walk down the tracks for their baths. Only official recognition of their presence was a tea with Hitler at which the Führer moved among the tables, chatting with them. Night before envoys of the U. S., Britain and France arrived, toucan-beaked Minister of Propaganda Paul Joseph Goebbels gibed that democracies were “stupid cows going to the slaughter house.”

Newshawks from the “stupid” democracies also came in for their share of attack. At a press reception, smooth-faced Dr. Otto Dietrich, Nazi press chief, denounced freedom of the press in democracies as “a mask behind which . . . vultures hide their faces.” U. S. correspondents smothered chuckles when the serious doctor declared that the duty of a New York journalist is to “tell lies and bow down in the temple of Mammon.” Next day the U. S. correspondents facetiously organized the “Most Noble Order of Journalistic Vultures.” Members, headed by a First Beak, will salute each other by placing thumbs behind their ears, flapping their fingers, emitting a throaty croak.

Shirt-Sleeve Interview. Rare pleasure of twelve favored foreign correspondents was a chatty interview with Herr Hitler. Informally meeting them in the room of Frederick Barbarossa in the 12th Century castle dominating old Nürnberg, Der Führer answered queries sometimes freely, sometimes directly, sometimes evasively.

Quizzed on the international scene,, he replied: “We are, for our part, quite calm. We do not want to do anything to anybody, and nobody can do anything against us.” But, he added, “Germany’s colonial problem must preface European peace. We will not be able to settle down until the colonial question is settled. It is not a question of war or peace but one of common sense.”

Main Tent. Each day of the political circus featured a different attraction in the centre ring. Most impressive: The march-past on the mammoth Zeppelin Meadow of the Arbeitsdienst—Nazi compulsory labor battalions. Forty thousand lads in rough khaki, 3,000 stripped to the waist, goose stepped past the Realmleader, mirrored thousands of times on the silver-blue spades they carried on their shoulders. Most beautiful: 22,000 alternate Nazi ranks, carrying flaming torches, wending their slow tramp along the search-lit walls of the turreted medieval city. Most spectacular: 140,000 brown-uniformed Storm Troopers lined up column upon column on the Zeppelin Meadow. Flanked along the sides of the floodlit arena crammed 250,000 spectators. With trumpets blaring, the Fuhrer mounted the platform, stood with chin cutting the atmosphere as three blood-red rivers, crimson party banners carried by brown-massed troops, moved toward him. Flames leaped from cressets atop the corners of the stadium, 250 army searchlights pierced 3.000 feet in the sky to make a gleaming square of light.