"Must"

Just at press time last week every German newspaper received a rush dispatch from the semi-official Telegraphen-Union news agency. It read:

"This must be run on the front page as an extra by all newspapers, with the heading RED AIR TEST OVER BERLIN :

''This afternoon a foreign plane of a type unknown in Germany appeared over Berlin and dropped handbills abusing the German Government. . . . This occurrence illuminates the strikingly untenable position that Germany is now in. Aircraft of a type heretofore not seen in Germany can unimpededly fly over German government buildings and drop handbills today--tomorrow, perhaps gas or explosive bombs carrying death and destruction."

Promptly Adolf Hitler's loudest roarer, Prussian Premier Hermann Goring, followed up with a blast. He had just defied the Treaty of Versailles by ordering two "police planes" to defend Berlin. Cried he:

"I have not, as head of the Department of Aeronautics, one plane in all Germany which I could have sent aloft yesterday. The incident shows how defenseless Germany is. Communistic planes might come over here any time."

When foreign newshawks tried to check details of the "Red Raid" they could discover neither any of the leaflets supposed to have been dropped nor a single Berlin eyewitness who had seen them fall. Every German questioned had merely read about the raid in the Nazi Press. A foreign official claimed actual possession of a copy of the leaflets but lamely explained: "The Government has no interest in spreading such insults." British correspondents in dispatches telephoned to London were first to brand the whole affair as a complete Hitlerite lie to ballyhoo National Aviation Week, which in Germany is this week.

Meanwhile in Linz, Austria, hundreds of witnesses were found who had seen a plane from Germany swoop down and drop leaflets containing Nazi threats against the Austrian Government of small, defiant Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss.

"The fight on Dollfuss," read Austrians who picked up these leaflets, "will assume whatever form and employ whatever weapons deemed necessary to achieve the goal."

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