GERMANY: Editing Hitler

From Germany last week arrived the first extensive report on a piquant subject, Adolf Hitler’s grammar. As is well known to German editors and foreign correspondents, the Führer, at the height of his harangues, often leaves his prepared official text and soars off in silver-tongued bombast, only to become lost in the inversions of German sentence structure. Foreign newshawks watch for these flights to cable facetious cracks at the Führer’s grammar. Vexed by such treatment, Hitler recently acted in defense of his eloquence. He set up no less than an Official Party Examining Commission for the Protection of National Socialist Writings. This new Bureau now edits and distributes all of the Führer’s addresses. Before the Bureau was created editors were left to their own devices in straightening out Hitler’s tortured utterances. They frequently failed and sometimes inadvertently produced a malicious twist to the Führer’s statements. As an example of the dire need for expert editing for Adolf Hitler it was officially explained that before the Bureau began its work “80% of the quotations attributed to Hitler were misquotations.”