Return to Orthodoxy?

"As a result of experiences during four months of war . . . Marshal Goring is taking over the direct management of war economy through the Economic General Staff. . . . The Ministries, with their respective Cabinet Ministers, are being reduced to purely routine administrative functions. ... A more substantial war loan is expected to be floated soon, presumably next month. . . . The attempt at the start of the war to introduce a deflationary policy by lowering wages and prices and extending working hours met such resistance in practice that it had to be largely abandoned. . . . The eight-hour day had to be restored. . . . Furthermore, while the slogan at the beginning of the war was to concentrate essential production in the most efficient plants and shut down the others, this principle is now being reversed and production is being scattered as widely as possible to keep up employment. . . . Under Field Marshal Hermann Goering as head of the Cabinet Council for the Defense of the Reich . . . German war economy seems to be return ing to more orthodox methods not much different from those used by the other side."

Thus cabled the New York Times's able Otto D. Tolischus from Berlin last week in a year-end review of Reich economics.

Same day in London the Laborite Dally Herald had No. 2 Nazi Goering in disgrace and on the skids: "For more than eight weeks Hitler and Goering have not ex changed more than a few words. . . . The last time Goering visited Hitler's Chancel lery at Berlin was Nov. 24. ... Neutral diplomats who prefer to see Goring rather than Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop must travel to Schoriheide [Goering's hunting chalet]. They have brought back reports of angry outbursts by Goering against Hitler's policy." Hardly was the Herald's ink dry on this story when Berlin correspondents found No. 2 Nazi Goering in conference at the Chancellery with Nazi No. 1 and other party bigwigs, as they drafted their usual New Year proclamations to the German people. "Leader, command," keynoted Marshal Goering's proclamation this week. "We follow."

"Soldiers!" keynoted the Fuehrer in his proclamation to the Army. "In the coming year we ask the Almighty Who, in the last year, took us under His protection, to give us His. blessing again and to strengthen us in the performance of our duty, for before us lies the hardest battle for existence of the German people. . . . Soldiers, Germany must be victorious." In a separate proclamation to the Nazi Party, A. Hitler eschewed any stress on Almighty God, affirmed that in 1939 "Jewish international capitalism, working with social reactionaries in western States, succeeded in setting the democratic world against Germany. . . . We fight, therefore, not only against the injustice of Versailles, but to prevent the even greater injustice intended to replace it."

In circles close to Marshal Goering, he is credited with having largely influenced the Fuehrer to countermand at the very last moment a major German offensive which had been minutely planned and was supposedly ready last November to sweep through neutral countries and outflank the Maginot Line. While Ribbentrop keeps pressing Hitler for a "smashing blow" at the Allies and is said to favor German aid to Russia in crushing Finland, Goering keeps pointing out to the Fuehrer the economic weakness of the Reich, the danger of staking everything on a drive against the Allies, the rashness of encouraging the Soviets. The Marshal's late and deeply beloved first wife was Swedish, her brother-in-law Count Eric von Rosen last week contributed largely in Stockholm to the Finnish cause.

In London last week the Conservative Evening Standard carried a Goering story worthy of E. Phillips Oppenheim. Accord ing to the Standard, the Marshal was angry because firebrand Nazi enemies of his in the Gestapo or Secret Police recently intercepted "more or less bona fide peace proposals" to him from the Allies. According to the Standard, the Marshal suspects that the bearers of these proposals were the mysterious "Best and Stevens," two Britons recently kidnapped from Holland into Germany by Gestapo agents who boasted they had caught "two British spies" (TIME, Dec. 4).

Although conservative in his counsels to the Fuehrer, peacocky Air Minister Goring is a blusterer in public whose swagger appeals to German airmen. This week Goering was featured as a contributor to the special New Year edition of Hitler's personal newspaper Volkischer Beobachter, blustered: "The German Air Force knows its decisive role in the struggle and is ready to take off at any time in the new year. . . . Allied measures will call forth counter-measures that will constantly increase in their fierceness. The German Air Force will meet the blockade with mighty blows. ... All that is needed is the Fuehrer's command. ... No land in the world is so vulnerable from the air as the British Isles. . . . When the [German] counterattack is made it will be an attack the like of which the world has never known." This was the umpteenth time that the Marshal had launched this sort of bombasting raid.

New Year editions of prominent local German newsorgans seldom quoted outside the Reich revealed this week that Nazi regional leaders and the Party rank & file are far from ready to see the Fatherland return to orthodoxy of any sort. In innumerable articles World War II is now being presented to the German masses as part of a vast, Nazi-led "international revolution" destined to crush capitalist society and usher in a "socialistic millennium." In these 100% National Socialist editorials "the greatest Reich and greatest people in Europe," the Germans, are said to have the mission of creating a "Socialism of nations." Their feature: a flat prediction by Adolf Hitler, "The Jewish capitalist world will not survive the 20th Century."

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