Swiss Hiss

Der Angriff, personal organ of ecstatic Minister of Propaganda & Public Enlightenment Paul Josef Goebbels. last week found a new villain to hiss at--the stolid, pedantic Press of Switzerland. ''The Swiss newspapers," roared Der Angriff, "are read only by those in Germany who have already emigrated in spirit and would emigrate in the flesh for good business. And if occasionally they do report something that is correct, that something is known to the competent political authorities much earlier. If it is something unpleasant, that also does not excite us. No states and no peoples consist of cherubs and seraphs alone. "Whether they [Swiss correspondents in Germany] continue to peep through keyholes and burrow in dirty political washing, they may be left to their fate. Their business, however, must show a sinking tendency in proportion to the realization by their lonesome readers in Germany of how little political importance attaches to Swiss opinion, and then these Swiss papers will have to return to their old profession, which is to entertain the hotel servants and shepherds and peasants of their native mountain pastures." Many things grow in a dictatorship but one which does not is honest readable journalism. Unable to find out from their own throttled Press what is going on in their homeland. German citizens have turned more and more to foreign papers. Austrian and Czechoslovakian papers that delighted in the most outlandish anti-Nazi stories were forbidden entry but there was little that could be done about the Swiss Press. Fourteen years of international conferences at Geneva and Lausanne and a national temperament that makes the Swiss the world's finest head waiters, have given Swiss newspapers an unbeatable sense of discretion. In ever increasing numbers Germans continued to buy the Neue Zuercher Zeitung, and those that could read French, the eminently respectable Journal de Geneve. Like the attentive public of Fan-dancer Sally Rand they never saw what they were looking for. but they never lost hope. And month after month the circulation and income of Nazi newspapers has shriveled & shrunk. That German reader interest was down to a new low concerned Herren Hitler and Goebbels much less than the fact that the decline in advertising had adversely affected all local trade and economic conditions in general. Two months ago one of the two or three most eminent papers in Germany, the 230-year-old Vossische Zeitung, died from loss of circulation (TIME, April 9). Since Hitler, 350 newspapers have gone out of business, including the considerable Deutsche Tageszeitung. Striving to halt the decline, which has struck his own paper as hard as any other, Minister Goebbels addressed a meeting of the German Press Association, cursed them for "cringing lapdogs" and demanded more courage, more constructive criticism of the regime.

One who actually believed that Herr Goebbels meant what he said was Editor Welk of Die Grime Post, an agricultural weekly that once had a circulation of a million. Editor Welk returned from the meeting to tap out a mild little editorial headed "Mr. Minister, A Word Please" which suggested that perhaps Minister of Propaganda Goebbels might have lost touch with the public, shut in as he was by thousands of antechambers. The presses had hardly stopped printing the editorial before Editor Welk found himself in a concentration camp and his paper suppressed for three months. Only the mocking laughter of the world Press forced Minister Goebbels to release him.

Heartened by the release of Editor Welk, the editor of a little East Prussian paper ventured last week to complain directly to Minister Goebbels:

"Herr Reichsminister! In our town the local Nazi leader delivers speeches three times a week. Each time he demands that I print his address in full with his photograph. I have done that 60 times now. If it continues my paper will go out of business and I will go crazy."

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