Death of the States

All in uniform, the 661 brown-shirted Deputies of the Nazi Reichstag last week passed three readings of a bill in five minutes, then hopped to their feet and passed the bill itself by acclamation. Even ten years ago the idea of such a bill would have turned any German statesman's hair white. By it the German States lost all legislative power, all ability to act in any way except as agents of the Reich, may soon lose even their traditional boundaries. The bill provided for:

1) Abolition of the State Diets.

2) Abolition of the Reichsrat (council of States' representatives in Berlin).

3) Transfer of all sovereign rights of the German states to their respective Statt-halters, or Nazi viceroys.

4) Authority for the Federal Government to draw up and promulgate a new Constitution for Germany.

The present confusion in the minds of the Nazi viceroys as to which of the temperamental Hitler hierarchy to take orders from was settled at the same time. Neither club-footed Paul Joseph Goebbels, bull-necked General Goering nor strange Captain Roehm will command them, now sole rulers of the individual provinces. Their orders will be laid down by Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick.

Lean, fanatical Dr. Wilhelm Frick, a veteran of the Munich beer hall Putsch of 1923, has long been a Nazi front ranker. Born in the Palatinate, he was Minister of Interior of Thuringia when most Nazis were discredited. He ran the State on such enthusiastically Nazi lines that the Republican Government of Chancellor Muller stopped a $60,000 a month subsidy to the Thuringian State police in an effort to get rid of the Palatinate, Thuringia, Bavaria and the rest of them.

"Bismarck's Second Reich did not interfere with the frontiers of the various States. This was one great error of the Second Reich. It is the historic task of our time," said he, "to create a powerful, national, unified State in place of the federal State existing heretofore. In the new Germany there is no place for federal States or for the borders they had. . . . Such institutions might even have a pernicious effect nowadays as a stimulus to Monarchist Party aims which are inimical to the people."

At the end of the 18th Century, when the French Constituent Assembly attacked the same problem, it split the old French provinces into new arbitrary departments, named for rivers and mountains. Last week Adolf Hitler hinted that the old borders of Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, were to be broken down. Rather than imitate France, he suggested that the new German states might be bounded by the territories of the Early Germanic tribes. Besides Goths, Frisians and Swabians, one of the most important German tribes were the Burgundians. A Nazi Burgundy seemed unlikely.

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