Totalitarians Rampant

On the top floor of Germany's remodeled, modernistic Chancellery is Adolf Hitler's private roof garden, bright with pansies, geraniums, potted shrubs. Last week Nazi staff chiefs gathered on this Hitler Olympus which overlooks the garden of President von Hindenburg. Joyously they received orders to make Germany at once what Chancellor Hitler called a "Totalitarian (One Party) State." Then they rushed clown from the roof garden to terrify the Fatherland with a series of pouncing raids which resulted in taking into custody even Herbert von Bismarck, grandnephew of the late famed Iron Chancellor.

Nazi police with pistols in their belts first swooped down on Germany's famed Stahlhelm (Steel Helmets), organization of World War veterans headed by Labor Minister Franz Seldte, retired soda water manufacturer. The 1,000,000 steel helmet troopers, whom Adolf Hitler once barred from joining his Storm detachments, were told that they must join the brownshirt Storm Battalions and obey hereafter only Chancellor Hitler. Similarly dissolved and merged were the 10,000 green-shirted youths organized by Nationalist Leader Dr. Alfred Hugenberg as his party's "Battle Ring."

Calling the green Battle Ringers contemptuously Froesche ("frogs"),* Nazi brownshirts padlocked their headquarters, carried off "Frog" Herbert von Bismarck for a night of grilling questions. Ironically the presses of Frog Chief Dr. Alfred Hugenberg. the Fatherland's newspaper tycoon who made World news fortnight ago by demanding the return to Germany of her pre-War colonies by the London Conference (see p. 17). were obliged to print with an approving tone last week that "The Chancellor received Dr. Hugenberg tonight with no others present and explained to him the reasons for the Battle Ring's suppression."

Next day, with lean, fanatical Minister of Interior Wilhelm Frick at the throttle, the Hitler juggernaut moved to squash flat what remained of the German Socialist Party, most of whose leaders had already fled the Reich. Long before Chancellor Hitler came to power, Nazi Frick as Minister of Culture and Interior in Thuringia made every schoolchild in that State kneel down every day and pray "Oh God. I believe Thou punishest the traitor and blessest the Liberator of our Homeland. Free us from deceit and treason!" Last week Dr. Frick denounced the entire Socialist Party as "treasonable . . . subversive and inimical to the State and people."

Seats held by Socialists in the Reichstag, where they are the second largest party, were declared abrogated. All over Germany last week Socialist deputies were ousted from State diets. Finally membership in the Socialist Party was decreed by Dr. Frick to be "naturally incompatible with State employees' receiving salaries, wages or pensions from the public funds." Thus Socialists hereafter must either serve the State without pay or quit their jobs.

To justify such drastic measures to the World up hopped intense, club-footed little Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels. Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment. "It is a Democratic fallacy that people want to govern themselves." shrilled he. "In our Germanic Democracy, people do not themselves engage in politics. They leave that to men having their confidence--to a hierarchy of leaders.

"It is difficult to be 100% Nazi. Therefore to be a Nazi shall forever remain the proud privilege of the minority: the steel ribs of the State!"

To suggestions that the Government's acts exceeded last week even the broad powers conferred on Chancellor Hitler by President von Hindenburg's Decree for the Protection of the People and the State, Dr. Goebbels snorted: "A government conscious of its own responsibility must also know how to break the fetters of the law!"*

Further blows by which Chancellor Hitler sought to smash all opposition:

P: Seizure of Boy Scout headquarters throughout the Reich last week, confiscation of Scout funds and forced enlistment of Scouts in Nazi youth organizations.

P: Suppression by decree of the immunity from arrest of Reichstag Deputies contained in Article 37 of the German Constitution, after which Nazi police jailed last week such prominent Socialist Deputies as Jewish Dr. Paul Loebe, for twelve years Speaker of the Reichstag who once called Herr Hitler "that Slovene with bloody fingers!"

P: Subjugation of the Protestant churches in Prussia (stronghold of German Protestantism) to the regulation of the State by the appointment last week of Nazi Herr August Jaeger as Commissioner for the Evangelical Church. This Hitler challenge to Protestantism brought the immediate resignation as Reichsbishof of the Evangelical Church of beloved Dr. Friedrich von Bodelschwingh "Bishop of the Poor" who was elected Reichsbishof only last month by a non-Nazi Protestant majority (TIME, June 12). Last week the Nazi Protestants, organized as the German Christian Church, manifestoed: "Protestants! Our true leader, Adolf Hitler, has expelled your seducers! He, a most devout Christian at heart, would have you find your way back to the Church. . . . Fight with us against church reaction and for German Christianity!"

Four days after Scripps-Howard newspapers' short chief, Roy W. Howard, scored an interview with the Emperor of Japan (see p. 37) his successor as president of United Press, Karl A. Bickel. was received in Berlin by Chancellor Hitler, put the pertinent question whether if Nazi nationalism should spread to other lands the result would be favorable to international peace. Coining a new paradox, Herr Hitler said. "The result would be 'International Nationalism' of the highest type throughout the world. . . . This would facilitate the solution of the most difficult problems."

*Qu'en disent Ies grenouilles? ("What say the frogs [of Paris]?'') was a common phrase among courtiers of Louis XVI at Versailles just before the French Revolution, referred to the fact that the Paris rabble were supposed to live like frogs in slime. Eighteenth Century Englishmen, suspecting that their French enemies ate frogs' legs, called them contemptuously "frogs."

*Most famed utterance of any German statesman in the 20th Century was "Necessity knows no law" by Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg to the Reichstag, Aug. 4, 1914.

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