GERMANY: Holy Roman Adolf

Adolf Hitler in a gaberdine pranced into hoary, high-spired Nuremberg last week for seven days of such pageantry and triumph as might befit the coronation of a Holy Roman Emperor. To heighten the excitement not even crown jewels were omitted.

One of Wilhelm II’s costliest whimsies as Kaiser and All Highest was to have the regalia of the Holy Roman Empire exactly duplicated in authentic jewels and precious metals. So perfect are these copies that only experts can distinguish them from the originals. Last week they were brought solemnly to Nuremberg and mysteriously displayed at the sixth annual National Socialist Party Congress.

Many a Nazi expected Realmleader Hitler to name his Vice Realmleader. equivalent to an Emperor naming his Crown Prince, for the powers and the term in office of Der Reichsführer are unlimited. In effect he is already Emperor. Would he dare do anything with those Crown Jewels?

For the first time the German Reichswehr participated at the Party Congress, ending the tradition that the German Army and its officers should remain outside politics. With Herr Hitler hobnobbed Defense Minister General Werner von Blomberg, Admiral Erich Raeder, Chief of the German Admiralty, and General Werner von Fritsch, Chief of the Reichswehr. In all 98 ranking officers appeared, to gether with the whole German Cabinet and every Nazi bigwig of note. Ambassadors of the Great Powers once again remained in Berlin, again fumed at “the impertinence of this ignoramus in inviting the corps diplomatique to a party caucus!”

As 600,000 Nazis converged on Nuremberg, more than doubling the old city’s population, some chanted a snatch of Ger man doggerel to the effect that “Since Father joined the Party and Mother joined the Franenschajt [Nazi women’s league] and Sister joined the Mädelbund [Nazi Maidens] and Brother joined the Storm Troops, we are met once a year at the Party Congress!”

50 Years In 50 Weeks. The Congress of 30,000 delegates was opened in vast Luitpold Hall on the outskirts of Nuremberg by the Vice Leader of the Nazi Party, darkling, bushybrowed Rudolf Hess. Because his German parents had him in Alexandria, he is called “The Egyptian.” Many expected Congress Chairman Hess to be named Vice Realmleader of all Germany, for no man is closer to psychic Adolf Hitler. The session opened with a proclamation from the Realmleader. He did not read it. left that to a henchman, sat with arms folded, once scratched vigorously behind his ear.

The proclamation affirmed that “for the next 1,000 years there will be no more revolution in Germany.” It claimed that every wholesome phase of the national life from farming to banking and from motoring to philosophy has been quickened and improved during “50 weeks in which more and greater things have been accomplished than have been brought to fruition in any previous 50 years!”

“Our next attack will demolish the opposition,” postulated the proclamation. “Two cannot stand on the same spot. Where we stand there is no room for any other!”

Marching out amid cheers, the Congress then resolved part of itself into a Culture Chamber and Orator Hitler spoke for a time on Kultur. The only female in his audience was beauteous Leni Riefenstahl. the Realmleader’s cinema favorite.* Perspiring freely as he wrestled with his subject, the Realmleader cried: “To be German means to be clear! The Greeks of ancient Athens were akin to the National Socialists of today. Only a pure race can create high art. National Socialism is a reaction against Jewish intellectualism. It is a return to intuition. . . . Literature has done more than anything else to alienate peoples. . . . Sensation-hungry foreign correspondents would do well to discover the metaphysical roots of National Socialism instead of dealing with sensations of the day. Only brainless spiritual dwarfs cannot realize that Germany is Europe’s shock absorber against the invasion of the immeasurable East which would have destroyed European culture. Hereafter the cultural as well as the political development of the Third Reich will be dictated by the Party!”

After this great effort to explain Nazi Kultur, the Realmleader visibly relaxed and on succeeding days reveled happily in the transports of Nazi devotion rendered him by division after division of his followers. Arriving nearly 200,000 strong each day, they drilled before the Realmleader on Zeppelin Meadows, a 48-acre field pack-jammed at every demonstration. As a special honor about 10% of each horde were privileged to goose-step past Realmleader Hitler in the public square, and, to make room for the marching columns, Nuremberg removed one of her most famed medieval monuments, the Fountain of Neptune, sacred to every tourist. “After the Party Congress is over,” anxious hotel men declared, “the Fountain of Neptune will be put back where it was.”

Army of Labor. Sensation of the Nuremberg week were 52,000 bronzed and apple-cheeked youths who drilled with highly polished spades, executing all maneuvers normally made with rifles.

Into these Labor Battalions onetime Laborer Adolf Hitler has put a good deal of heart. To suspicious Frenchmen they are troops drilling in flat violation of the Treaty of Versailles. To the Realmleader they are more. They are almost all that is left of the Socialism in his National Socialist creed which events have made steadily more Nationalist.

“Hail, my Labormen!” cried the Realmleader, bursting with honest pride. “Hail, My Leader!” roared 52,000 young throats, then chanted in unison: “One Leader! One Reich! Deutschland uber Attest Heil Hitler!”

In an address, Der Reichsführer promised: “No one will live in Germany who views the work of his hands as inferior to other work! We do not wish to be theoretical Socialists. In the future all young Germany will pass through your labor corps!”

Precisely what this meant no German perhaps knew, but millions thought they did. Somehow by a process of conscripting German youth for a year into the ranks of Labormen, as France conscripts its youths for service in the army, Adolf Hitler has a notion that he will produce his kind of Socialism, and in addition ideal human material for soldiers. On the front row of the reviewing stand last week Chief of the Reichswehr General von Fritsch kept his keen, bemonocled eye on every move of the goose-stepping spade brigadiers, pronounced their drill vastly better than he had expected.

Army of Bosses. Next day the polished spades were gone and 180,000 party henchmen—the heroes who got out the 90% vote of “Ja!”—marched brown-clad before Adolf Hitler. Not Storm Troops, these Nazi paladins were informed at Nuremberg that since Adolf Hitler’s “blood purge,” the Storm Troops, then 2,500,000 strong, have been vigorously combed and reduced to 700,000 last week. In this process such tricks were used as forming Storm Troopers of suspected loyalty into “new divisions,” ordering these to perform impossibly hard drill and accepting with alacrity the resignations of all who wished to resign. Orating at night under Klieg lights to the 180,000 petty party bosses, Realmleader Hitler told them : “We are strong and will get stronger! What we have won by fighting we mean to keep!”

Army of Youth. Bugled out of camp beds at 5 a. m., 60,000 boys of the Hitler Youth were kept standing for four hours under a sizzling sun on Zeppelin Meadows. Over 100 fainted but the rest cheered Realmleader Hitler when he finally arrived to command “Be brave! … Be proud! … Be hard as flint!”

Army of Mothers. Two thousand females, representing Nazi womanhood in much the smallest demonstration of the week, shrilled cheer on cheer as Bachelor Hitler told them that “while man makes his supreme sacrifice on the field of battle, woman fights her supreme battle for the nation when she gives life to a child. The conception of so-called ‘woman’s equality’ is a product of decadent Jewish intellectualism.”

Army of the Purged. For the first time since he ordered their leaders shot in the Nazi “blood purge” (TIME, July 9), Realmleader Hitler reviewed Storm Troops last week, with General von Blomberg of the Reichswehr present as guest of honor. “Only a demented idiot or a deliberate liar” shouted Hitler “can think that I or anyone else ever dreamed of dissolving what we ourselves built up. My relations with you, my comrades, are exactly what they have always been!”

Loudly the 88,000 Storm Troopers present cheered Orator Hitler but coldly received an oration from their new Chief of Staff Victor Lutze, successor to that popular pederast, blood-purged Ernst Roehm.

Army and Messiah. The smart wind-up at Nuremberg was a thundering war game hotly fought over a realistically constructed “No Man’s Land” by Reichswehr divisions of signal and motor corps, cavalry and artillery at full war strength. This show of might provoked in the myriads of German spectators such transports of devotion to the Realmleader that the Associated Press felt obliged to report “Sacrilegious though it may seem, Germany of today can be explained to the foreigner only if he is made to realize that the great German nation has a Messiah-complex and that Hitler is the incarnation.”

* Because she agrees with him that sex in cinema is almost unnecessary, since “the camera can catch and dramatize the grandeurs and wonders of nature.” The U. S. saw Nature’s Leni in S. O. S. Iceberg, an able filming of well-chosen acts of God (TIME, Oct. 2). As her own author, director and star she made The Blue Light, a Teuton fairy story, screened in the romantic Dolomites, which was one of the German films to be sent to the 1933 International Cinema Exposition at Venice.