Foreign News: Plank No. 16

Adolf Hitler snared the votes of Germany’s enormous petty shopkeeper class by promising in famed Plank No. 16 of the Nazi Party Platform: ”Immediate communalization of the large department stores and their rental at low cost to small merchants.”

Last week the Fatherland was still waiting for Leader Hitler to carve up Wertheim’s in Berlin and Germany’s other great department stores into cubicles and booths, each tended by a happy shopkeeper. Failure to carry out Plank No. 16 is the more dangerous to Chancellor Hitler’s prestige because the Nazi Party claims to be unique in that its entire Platform is “unalterable.” Moreover, since most German department stores are owned by Jews, enthusiastic Jew-baiting Nazi Storm Troopers have been asking louder and louder of late, “Why don’t we throw the swine out?”

While Leader Hitler kept mum last week, Minister of Economics Dr. Kurt Schmitt told the Storm Troopers why. “We must destroy as little as possible and build up as much as possible,” he sweetly reasoned. “Department stores cannot simply be wiped out of Germany. They employ a quarter of a million people and a billion marks are invested in them.”

Most aggravating to zealous Storm Troopers was Dr. Schmitt’s further declaration that to distinguish between Jewish and non-Jewish firms, for the purpose of boycotting the former, is “impossible of achievement” because in such large enterprises Jewish and non-Jewish interests are so often intermixed. As though he feared Storm Troopers would not believe he spoke for the Party, Dr. Schmitt insisted that his announcement had been approved by that fieriest of Jew-baiters, hot-eyed, club-footed Minister of Propaganda & Public Enlightenment Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels.

Since Plank No. 16 is so much a part of the Platform that it can scarcely be torn out with safety, Chancellor Hitler soothed his Storm Troops with a statement issued by Chief Adjutant Rudolf Hess. “Strong measures will be taken if misguided efforts to boycott department stores do not cease,” declared Chief Adjutant Hess, “but the Party’s attitude toward department stores remains unchanged in principle. Its solution will follow in due course. In view of the Government’s fight against unemployment, it is undesirable to undertake at the present time anything calculated to ruin stores which employ so many thousands.”

So appealing to petty shopkeepers in all parts of Europe is the idea of carving up department stores that recently it has been taken up by Swiss Nazis, insignificant in numbers as yet. Last week the Swiss State Council voted 23 to 1 to bar the opening of any new department stores in Switzerland, also forbade enlargement of existing stores.