Brown Trout & Bitterness

Up & down Germany the question flashed last week: Had Adolf Hitler at last gone crazy? Had his nerves given way? Was he really in a straitjacket, jittering in a Bavarian asylum? He was not. Handsome Adolf was actually high in the Bavarian Alps with a few intimate friends, slowly flailing the chalky waters of mountain streams for speckled brown trout which his quiet sister boiled till blue and served on lettuce leaves for the Hitler supper. Even so the lunacy legend kept the chief Nazi pressagent, a former Manhattan print dealer named Ernst Franz Hanfstaengl, busy for two days issuing angry denials. The story was inspired apparently by two bad-tempered and most inopportune messages which the bristle-lipped leader issued immediately after live Nazis were sentenced to death at Beuthen, Silesia fortnight ago for beating a Communist to death (TIME, Aug. 29). First message was to the murderers themselves to whose defense he had already sent his own lawyer:

"My comrades: In view of the monstrous and gory sentence that has been passed upon you, I feel that I am linked to you in unbounded loyalty. From this moment ... a struggle against the Government under which this has come to pass is our duty."

The average German, whatever his other opinions of the von Schleicher-Papen regime, was behind them 100% in their determination to put an end to political assassination. By linking himself definitely with the condemned, Handsome Adolf lost enormous influence in the Reich. His second message was no more tactful:

"Herr von Papen, your bloody objectivity does not exist for me. I am not suited to become the executioner of patriotic fighters for freedom. . . . Heaven may send us torture upon torture but our movement will be able to finish this guillotine government."

Beside starting a rumor all over the country that he had lost his mind, these two blasts had the following definite results:

At his country home in Neudeck old Paul von Hindenburg let his associates know once and for all that he was through with Hitler.

War Minister von Schleicher, who had been trying to pacify Nazis by incorporating their storm troops with the regular army in some manner, admitted that he no longer dared attempt it.

Gumbel. The Nazis had one victory for the week. After weeks of angry protest, Fascist students at Heidelberg succeeded in having tall, stoop-shouldered Professor Emil J. Gumbel dropped from the faculty. His crime according to the Nazis was that he had announced in a lecture: "A turnip is better than a war memorial, than a statue adorned by scantily clad ladies.'' Professor Gumbel heard the news at Cornell last week where he was attending the International Congress of Genetics (see p. 21). He was not surprised.

"One doesn't become popular," said he. "by saying that a popular policy will lead a country to catastrophe, especially if events have shown it to be true. There is no question that I am a pacifist. The War made me that. And I am an antiFascist. I am in favor of the republic and peace and the welfare of the working class."

Emil Gumbel's real dynamite was in three books that he published between 1919 and 1922, Four years of War Lies, Two Years of Political Murders, Four Years of Political Murders. In these the Professor listed proof of over 400 political assassinations. In 1924 the Minister of Justice admitted the truth of most of them but they did not endear him to the Nazis.

Goebbels. Offsetting the ousting of Gumbel, the Hitlerites had their quickest wit, their loudest mouth closed up for a week. By government order Der Angriff, Nazi organ, was suppressed for "inciting to disobedience and resistance against the State." Editor of Der Angriff is Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, a gnomelike little man with a tart tongue and a club foot, who appeared from nowhere about two years ago, rapidly rose to be Fascist deputy, editor of the party organ and one of the right-hand men of Adolf Hitler. Herr Hitler attended Dr. Goebbels' wedding last winter. Fortnight ago when the Nazis were venting their rage at the von Papen Cabinet, tart-tongued Goebbels coined the bon mot of the week at the expense of General von Schleicher: "Bayonets may be good for lots of things, but one cannot sit on them forever." The quotation that caused his muzzling last week was angrier and not so funny. Writing of the Beuthen death sentences he said:

"Never forget it, comrades, and repeat it a hundred times so you will say it in your dreams--THE JEWS ARE TO BLAME! They will never escape the tribunals they deserve."

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