Monday, Feb. 27, 1933

Nazi Notes

P: Up & down the Fatherland Chancellor Adolf Hitler thundered last week in election speeches that no matter how Germans vote March 4 his Government will retain power.

"If the German people should desert us, that will not restrain us!" he roared in a Berlin speech which timid Press censors first suppressed. "Whatever happens we will take the course that is necessary to save Germany from ruin!" P: In Prussia (which is nearly two-thirds of Germany) 24 provincial governors and police chiefs "suspect of Republicanism" were ousted and replaced by reactionary government supporters such as Nazi Rear Admiral Magnus von Levetzow, appointed Chief of Police of Berlin. Next day Prussian police started confiscating the passports of such famed Liberals & Pacifists as Hellmuth von Gerlach, thus cooping them in Germany as Dictators Stalin & Mussolini coop enemies of their reegimes in Russia & Italy.

P: In the Reichstag building when small, bespectacled, aging Socialist Paul Lobe tried to call the Reichstag Committee for Protection of Civil Rights to order as its chairman he was shoved out of the chair by six-foot Nazi Lawyer Hans Frank who shouted: "You Marxist liar! You're unfit to preside. I declare myself chairman!" As Socialist, Communist and Centrist committeemen stalked out, one of them lit a cigar, had it wrenched from his teeth by a Nazi who cried: "Show respect to the Chairman!"

P: Monarchists pinned premature hopes on the Nazis when "Empress Hermine" (spouse of Wilhelm II) journeyed from Doorn to Berlin in a reputed effort to sound out Chancellor Hitler on restoration. In the National Theatre at Munich the Royal box was occupied during a performance of Der Vogelhaendler ("The Birdseller") last week by iron-jawed former Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, his beauteous wife and her two sisters. When Bavarian stage soldiers began to sing "God be With Thee, Bavarian Lamb!" the audience burst into Monarchist cheers, hacked "Their Majesties." P: Because the entire Catholic Press of Prussia printed a warning against revolution and a criticism of Chancellor Hitler signed by 13 Catholic societies, virtually the entire Catholic Press of Prussia (more than 300 newspapers) was suppressed for three days. With hundreds of other Opposition newspapers being suppressed and with Opposition candidates barred from the radio while every German station was compelled to broadcast Chancellor Hitler's speeches,*the Berlin Bureau of the New York Herald Tribune opened a dispatch thus: "What is manifestly the most unfair election campaign that Germany has ever seen is now taking place." P: The Berlin Bureau of the London Times flashed that Chancellor Hitler's henchmen "are in a position to brush aside any suggestion that their ambitions can now be thwarted from any quarter, even the highest" and declared that "President von Hindenburg is either a prisoner of the development initiated by him or is a prisoner in the Palace on the Wilhelmstrasse."

*Result: All German radio stations were simultaneously silenced when persons unknown cut the cable of a microphone into which Chancellor Hitler was shouting at Stuttgart.

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