Foreign News: Plate Glass Riots

The day the Reichstag opened last week there was bedlam within (see p. 21), riot without. Communists roared the Internationale among the trees and bushes of the Tiergarten,* were chased from cover by mounted police. Fascists came early, sat in squads upon all Tiergarten benches near the Reichstag, bawled “Hail Hitler!” and “Wake up Germany!” hour after hour, growing more and more hoarse. To keep order nearly all Berlin’s police were concentrated around the Reichstag — with dire result.

In the unguarded quarter of Berlin’s smart shops and great department stores — a vicinity where the streets are so well paved that it is quite impossible to pick up stones — innocent looking citizens sud-denly appeared with stones in their pockets. Shrewdly they distributed themselves in front of the plate glass windows of Jewish-owned stores: Wertheim’s, Griinfeld’s, Behrendt’s, Cords’. . . .

Wertheim’s, Germans firmly believe, is the “Largest Department Store in the World,” sells everything from toothpicks to limousines. Its block-long façade contains 36 large, shimmering plate-glass windows. Abruptly, at a mysterious signal, out from pockets leaped stones, smashed every Wertheim pane and many another.

Windows higher up were shattered by pistol shots. Jewish-owned cafés and banks suffered similar pane-smashes. So adroit was the whole piece of vandalism, so swiftly did the stonethrowers disperse, that when police arrived, frantically summoned by the Jewish store owners, there was nobody to be arrested except very large crowds of curious, innocent by-standers.

Efficiently the police charged. In street after street their method was the same. A double line, stretching from wall to wall, rushed down the street at a run, rubber clubs flailing. Persons who “resisted” or could not get out of the way fast enough were arrested. Nearly all were set free as fast as dunder-headed policemen marched them before intelligent Berlin judges.

Blame. Chief of Berlin Police Karl Zörgiebel said: “Virtually none but Fascists participated in the attacks on Jewish-owned stores.”

Said Adolph Hitler at Berlin Fascist headquarters:

“The window-smashing was perpetrated mainly by rowdies, thieves, plunderers and Communist provocateurs. . . . The police have been unable to give us the name of a single Fascist who had any part in the smashing of windows. . . . These acts of violence have nothing to do with our movement.”

In a bulletin to the press he formally charged that, in order to discredit the Fascist Party, the Communist Party caused its members to smash the windows and to shout with diabolic cunning as they did so, “Hail Hitler!”

Correspondents who called at Communist Party headquarters were met with hot Red denials, questioned: “Don’t you know they smashed Jewish windows? Only Jewish windows! Would we do that? Think it over!”

*Formerly the “Deer Park” where Hohenzollerns hunted with hound and horn in the middle of continental Europe’s largest city. Today the Tiergarten is a public park but still bushy and foresty, though crisscrossed by immaculate, grass-bordered avenues.