GERMANY: Price Dictation

If President Roosevelt should decide that no Democrat can control prices, if he should give that job to a Republican especially close to Herbert Hoover, then the New Deal would have sunk as low as Adolf Hitler felt obliged to stoop last week.

Three years ago President Hoover and that pallid, ascetic German Chancellor, Dr. Heinrich Brüning, were both pursuing the same policy: Deflation. That winter German prices fell 10%. hammered down —so the German people believe—by Dr. Brüning’s implacable ”Price Dictator,” Dr. Karl Gördeler.

Then as now Dr. Gördeler was Leipzig’s Mayor. Reviled by Nazi orators for years, he is still emphatically no Nazi. His name inspires confidence among middleclass Germans who. fearful of acute shortages in the Fatherland this winter, have lately been buying up foodstuffs and clothing in a frantic rush to hoard (TIME, Aug. 6). One day last week Herr Hitler abruptly raised non-Nazi Mayor Gördeler once more to the rank of Price Dictator, made him “solely responsible to the Realmleader.”

Striving to cover up Nazidom’s most spectacular admission of failure to master German economic problems, Adolf Hitler’s personal newsorgan Völkischer Beobachter, printed these brave words: “We National Socialists do not believe in economic laws. We believe in the creative ability of our race. Because we believe in this power of our race, economics is subject to our creative ability.”

The new Price Dictator is indeed of German race. Needing all its creative ability, he showed little of it last week. Because the most savage efforts to control German prices have already been made by the Government for months, because Herr Hitler was supposed to have solved the price problem by appointing Reichsbank President Dr. Hjalmar Schacht his “Economic Dictator” (TIME, Aug. 13), and because German economists are in fact at their wits’ ends. Mayor Gördeler could do little last week but threaten and attempt to reassure.

“I will unmercifully put aside all unjustifiable price increases,” he announced. “Price increases have taken place in many fields in recent months that are absolutely unbearable. A fear psychosis has crept in from which I would like to liberate those affected. . . . Wear your old clothes down to the last thread if necessary. . . . There is no excuse for any kind of worry about the supply of our daily needs. . . . My first activities will centre on food and clothing, for their prices seem to me the most critical.”