"National Revolution!"

(See front cover)

Banned in Berlin on election day this week was the flag of Germany: black, red & gold.

When a Prussian Deputy tried to fly his country's flag. Berlin police made him take it down. The Deputy's country--the German Republic--was dying if not dead. Meanwhile out of the ballot box another Germany was being reborn. Its flag-- black, white & red--the onetime Imperial Hohenzollern colors, flew in every street, floated majestically from Government buildings and was flaunted everywhere by shouting, cheering throngs. Goosestepping as smartly as when they were members of Germany's Imperial Army, and with several Hohenzollern Princes in their ranks, 20,000 Stahlhelmers paraded down Unter den Linden. Strangely enough, no monarchical restoration loomed. Chancellor Adolf Hitler had merely gone to the German people under borrowed colors, had won a thundering cataclysmic victory with catchwords as loose as his slogan: "Rebirth or Bolshevism!"

Not dazzled by a promised "new deal" (for Chancellor Hitler made no specific election pledges whatsoever), Germans, hoping that somehow he will bring back "the good old times." turned out in such numbers on the brilliant, balmy Election Sunday that 88% of the electorate cast ballots--an all-time record. Stay-at-homes got no peace from the Government radio which sternly commanded every few minutes: "Do your duty! Get out and vote! Cast your ballot for the Government parties! Do it now!"

The Returns. From two elections the same day (No. 1 for the German Reichstag; No. 2 for the Diet of Prussia, which governs nearly two-thirds of the Reich) Germans received these significant returns :

The Reichstag New Former Change

*NationaI Socialists 288 (44.17%) 196 (33.67%) +92

Nationalists 52 (8 %) 54 (9.2%) -2

Socialists 120 (18.4%) 121 (20.7%) -1

Communists 81 (12,5%) 100 (17.1%) -19

/- Catholic Centrists 73 (11.2%) 70 (12 %) + 3

Bavarian Populists 20 (3%) 20 ( 3.4%)

Splinter Parties 18 ( 2.8%) 23 (4% ) -9

The New Prussian Diet

National Socialists 44.6%

Nationalists 9 %

Socialists 16.9%

Catholic Centrists 14.4%

Communists 13.45

Splinter Parties 1.7%

Thus the Government parties won a clear majority in both Diet and Reichstag. Moreover, if the Communist votes are nullified by Government decree (see below), Chancellor Hitler's Nazis by themselves will have absolute majorities, can tell Dr. Hugenberg and Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen to go to the devil.

Jubilant, the Nazis celebrated on election night by seizing the Municipal Government of Hamburg, a "free city" which is legally a State of the German Republic, contains more than 1,000,000 inhabitants. On telegraphic orders from Berlin grim Nazi Storm Troops rushed upon Hamburg's Socialist Mayor. Dr. Karl Petersen, who promptly resigned. The flag soon broken out above Hamburg's City Hall was neither the Republican nor the Hohenzollern banner. Having won the election under borrowed colors, the Nazis hoisted the Nazi flag: red. with a black swastika in its round white bull's eye.

Though there had been no violence In Hamburg, the government of the Free City was seized under President von Hindenburg's decree "to check Communist violence imperiling the State."

Exulted Chancellor Hitler: "The National revolution is on its way and will continue!"

Living Shields, Boiling Oil. Before German Democracy could thus be downed this week, the Hitler Cabinet had to launch last week a juggernaut of super-suppressive measures & decrees for which they needed an excuse. What excuse could be better than the colossal act of arson which had just sent a $1,500,000 fire roaring through the Reichstag Building (TIME, March 6) gutting completely the brown oak Reichstag Chamber and ruining its great dome of gilded copper and glass?**

The Reichstag fire was set by Communists, police promptly charged. Over a nationwide radio hookup the Minister of Interior for Prussia, blustering Nazi Captain Hermann Wilhelm Goring, cried: "The Reichstag fire was to have been the signal for the outbreak of open civil war! . . . The Communists had in readiness 'terror squads' of 200 each. . . . These were to commit their dastardly acts disguised as units of our own Nazi Storm Troops and the Stahlhelm. . . . The women and children of high Government officials were to have been kidnapped as hostages and used in the civil war as 'living shields'! . . .

"The Communists had organized to poison food . . . and burn down granaries throughout the Reich. . . . They planned to use every kind of weapon--even hot water, knives and forks and boiling oil! . . .

"From all these horrors we have saved the Fatherland! We want to state clearly that the measures taken are not a mere defense against Communism. Ours is a fight to the finish until Communism has been absolutely uprooted in Germany!"

Versailles Violated. Measures taken included flat violation of the Treaty of Versailles by raising the number of Germans under arms. Pistols and in many cases rifles were issued to some 60,000 so-called "auxiliary Prussian police" made up as follows: 50% ordinary troopers from the Nazi Sturmabteilung; 30% picked Nazi shock troops from the Schutzstaffel, Hitler's Praetorian Guard; 20% members of the Stahlhelm ("Steel Helmets"), War veterans' association whose leader is Minister of Labor Herr Franz Seldte, rich bottler of soda water. With astounding boldness the State ordered that men drafted as "auxiliaries" while holding jobs shall continue to be paid their full wages, irrespective of how much or little time police duties leave them for their regular work. Thus Germany's employer class was saddled by adroit Chancellor Hitler with most of the burden of supporting what amounts to an additional force of 60.000 fully armed Germans.*

Constitution Crimped. With the Reichstag fire as his excuse, weary old President Paul von Hindenburg signed a decree giving Chancellor Hitler & Cabinet a tyrant's powers. Totally suspended by this decree are the following seven articles of the German Constitution (some of them already modified by previous laws & decrees) :

Article 114, which provided that "freedom of the person may not be impaired."

Article 115: "The home of every German is his place of refuge and may not be violated. . . ."

Article 117: "Secrecy of letters and of postal, telegraph and telephone services may not be impaired. . . ."

Article 118: "Every German has the right within the limits of the general laws to express his opinion by word, in writing, printing, by picture, or in any other way. . . ."

Article 123: "All Germans have the right to gather in meetings peaceably and unarmed without announcement or particular permission. . . ."

Article 124: "All Germans have the right to form societies or associations for purposes not contrary to the penal law.

Article 153: "Property is safeguarded by the Constitution. . . ."

After cutting from under every German these vital parts of his Constitution, the President fixed Death as the penalty for attempting to secure or disclosing important military secrets. Imprisonment for ten years was provided for transmitting to foreign governments "news, even if false, which should be kept secret in the interests of the Reich." Finally foreign correspondents in Germany were gagged with the threat of "not less than three months imprisonment" for transmitting abroad "news which should be kept from foreign governments, even if false."

When apprehensive U. S., British and French correspondents gathered to hear this ukase read out last week, the whole Opposition Press of Prussia had already been suppressed. "We simply will not let the Communist and Marxist Press rise again!" cried Chief Government Press Officer Walther Funk. "We have definite evidence that all the money now being received by German Communists comes from France! What's that? No, I cannot divulge the details.

"You must realize, Heine Herren, that what has happened in Germany is no ordinary change. A new era has begun! Parliamentary and Democratic times are past."

Grimly one of Herr Funk's assistants recalled that 6,000,000 Germans or one-sixth of all Germans who went to the polls voted Communist in November 1932. "This time," he exulted, "every Communist ballot will be thrown out!"

On to Potsdam! Just what kind of a man he is Chancellor Adolf Hitler amply revealed in his final Berlin campaign speech, cheered almost continuously by 20,000 frenzied Nazis packed into the vast Sportpalast. Lumping Communism. Democracy and Socialism under one head, Orator Hitler did his best to cut it off. ''Marxism proceeds on the assumption of all being equal!" he roared. "As a corollary to this principle Democracy also postulates that not only must nations be appraised as equal in quality but that individuals also must not be differentiated. This obviously leads to the throttling of individual capacity! [cheers]. . . .

"The Communists would turn [moderate Marxism or Democracy] into a radical form. . . . Well, we will take up the struggle against this insanity! [thunderous cheers] Not because we are in love with Capitalism--I am myself a child of the lower classes [deafening huzzahs]--but because we want to spare the people. . . . We will rebuild the German Reich by tenacious work! . . . The rise of the German people cannot be prevented!"

Amid transports of joy Chancellor Hitler announced that henceforth the Reichstag will no longer meet in liberal, proletarian Berlin but in imperial, aristocratic Potsdam. On April 1 the new Reichstag will convene for business in the Garrison Church at Potsdam, a national military shrine in which Frederick the Great lies buried.

General Massacre? Meanwhile Russian, French, Scandinavian and British newspapers reached press-gagged Berlin with reports that it was not Communisms but the Nazis themselves who fired the Berlin Reichstag--for reasons only too obvious.

The British Press, led by the London Times, went even further in accusation. Said the Times: "The threat of a general massacre of political opponents [by the Nazis] might have been dismissed two months ago as crude bravado but cannot be rated so lightly now. . . . Although the rumors may prove unfounded, they continue to reach England from several good sources." London's Daily Herald, one-time organ of James Ramsay MacDonald, now of the British Labor Party, declared: "A quarter-million Nazi storm troops, including desperate characters over whom even Chancellor Hitler cannot exercise control, will, it is stated, invade the large towns of Prussia and slaughter all progressive leaders and Jews of whom, both men and women, a long list has already been prepared."

Meeting hastily, the Hitler Cabinet discussed measures to expel from Germany all foreign correspondents, did not quite dare last week. Eager to catch a Red, several of the new "auxiliary police'' stormed the apartment of Dr. Lily Keith, Berlin representative of the Moscow Izvestia, while she telephoned the Soviet Ambassador. Bursting in. the "auxiliaries" ransacked Dr. Keith's rooms for two hours, dragged her off to jail. After the Soviet Government had officially demanded Correspondent Keith's release, she was turned loose. Meanwhile more than 350 German Communists (including Reichstag Deputies) were jailed and Berlin police boasted that if Professor Albert Einstein should return from California they could arrest him since he had once supported Communism by testifying for a Communist in court.

Hitler. The life of Adolf Hitler can be summed up in a few snapshot scenes:

1919. In the middle of a dreary Munich bedroom floor two mice nibble every morning at a piece of sugar set out for them by one Adolf Hitler, Austrian-born veteran of the Imperial German Army, wounded, gassed, Iron Crossed. Six other men as obscure as himself suggest that he join their German Labor Party, give him Membership Card No. 7, written in longhand. Meeting on Wednesday, the Executive Committee of the Party elect No. 7 their Chief of Propaganda, are amazed when he rounds up a meeting of 130, flabbergasted when he sweeps all before him with a loose but passionate 20-min. speech bursting with personal magnetism.

1924. Barbed wire entanglements thrown up around Munich's former Military Academy to keep back a mob which roars, "Hail Ludendorff! Hail Hitler!" Stiffly in full uniform & medals, Prisoner Ludendorff poses with Prisoner Hitler who wears his raincoat with an air of defiance. Together ex-General Ludendorff and ex-Corporal Hitler, tried on charges of high treason for having led together the .famed Munich Beer Hall putsch which failed, cost 18 lives. Prisoner Hitler, as leader of the party of seven men which by this time has become the National Socialist (Nazi) Party of 30,000, shouts at his judges: "I know your sentence! But that high court above will not ask us, 'have you committed high treason?' That court will judge us all: the Quartermaster General [Ludendorff] of the old Army, his officers and soldiers, who have wanted to do their duty as Germans for the people and the Fatherland, who wanted to fight and die! You may doom us a thousand times and yet the Goddess of the Eternal Court of History will tear to pieces the indictment of the State prosecutor and the sentence of this Court! Her verdict will be acquittal!"

When Herr Hitler has been convicted, the crowd cheers him so fiercely that he has to be shown on a balcony, take several bows. When General Ludendorff is acquitted (obviously in tribute to his War-time service), he sneers at his judges: "My acquittal is a humiliation which this uniform and these decorations have not deserved!"

Convict Hitler and eight others receive the light sentence of detention in a fortress where they have connecting rooms. During his ten-month sojourn there, Prisoner Hitler pens the 800 bombastic pages of Mein Kampf ("My Struggle"). Says the warden as they part: "I too, Herr Hitler, am now a Nazi."

1932. In his presidential study 85-year-old Paul von Hindenburg disdainfully refuses 43-year-old Adolf Hitler's plea that he, as leader of the Nazi Party (largest in the Reichstag) be made Chancellor with "precisely the powers" of Benito Mussolini (TIME, Aug. 22). Less than six months after this rebuff, the Goddess of the Eternal Court of History--as Orator Hitler so fetchingly calls her--makes him Chancellor of the Reich by assent of Old Paul von Hindenburg (TIME, Feb. 6).

Last week his Goddess seemed to fling all Germany prostrate before Conqueror Hitler's triumphal car.

Hitlerism, In what sign does the pudgy little vegetarian with the Charlie Chaplin mustache conquer?

Today most Germans are agreed that Hitlerism, with its bombastic counsels of violence, treaty-breaking and Jew-baiting, would have swept their country years ago had not Germans been lulled by a false, post-War prosperity induced in the Fatherland by a flood of U. S. loans. These loans enabled Germany to pay Reparations with borrowed money, turned the shackles riveted on her by the Treaty of Versailles almost into golden bracelets. When Depression showed the bracelets to be iron, Germany-in-chains was ready to break them by turning to the doctrines of Messiah Hitler who had been preaching repudiation from the first.

Basically Hitlerism is a doctrine of confused tenets, further confused by Orator Hitler as he goes along. Take, for example, the plain, basic word capital. No thinker himself, Herr Hitler has confessed that Hitlerism's tenets about capital are borrowed from a onetime building engineer, Herr Gottfried Feder, recently appointed by Chancellor Hitler to the Reichstag Finance Committee. According to Feder there are two kinds of capital: 1) raffendes or "grasping capital" hoarded in banks, from which interest or dividends is received by such rascals as Jews; and 2) schaffendes or "creative capital" which is the life blood of German enterprise and therefore good, even though paying interest or dividends. Thanks to this masterly though absurd "distinction," a Hitlerite can preach expropriation of capital to factory hands, then walk into the directors' room and promise protection of capital, remaining all the while "consistent." "National Socialism." the name of the Hitler Party, is another piece of intentional confusion, useful in catching both Nationalist and Socialist votes-- votes which had meant exactly opposite things until stirred into Hitlerism.

Finally certain Jews--who contribute to Nazi funds--are supposed to be outside the application of Hitlerism's most if not only definite tenet: antiSemitism. In their Jew baiting (and in every Communist, Nazis see a "tainted" German, probably Jewish if his ancestry were known) the Hitler Storm Troopers take real pleasure. True Germans, they feel, are instinctively Jew-baiters. To prove this Nazis quote:

Frederick the Great: "We command that the Jews in the smaller towns, especially those which lie in the country, and which can be harmed most by Jews, be sent away."

Bismarck: "I will give the Jews every right, except that of holding a high office in a Christian state."

Wagner: "The Jew is the plastic demon of the decline of mankind."

Up to last week Adolf Hitler, who dotes on Wagnerian music and surrounds himself with portraits and busts of Bismarck and Frederick the Great, had set forth nothing which could be called a program of what his Government intends to do for and with Germany. From now until April Fool's Day (on which the new Reichstag will convene) Chancellor Hitler intends to rule virtually as a dictator. According to Nazi henchmen, the Reichstag will transact only two pieces of business: it will give Germany a new national flag, will then "adjourn indefinitely."

*The Government bloc, respectively headed by National Socialist (Nazi) Chancellor Hitler and Nationalist Minister of Economics. Food & Agriculture Dr. Alfred Hugenberg, Germany's Hearstian news and cinema tycoon.

/-The Catholic bloc.

**Still standing are the outer walls of Silesian sandstone and much of the interior, ornately marbled. France paid for the whole building as part of the Franco-Prussian War indemnity. Above the main door a grim stone figure of St. George frowns with the face of Iron Chancellor Bismarck.

*The Treaty of Versailles limits Germany to an army of 100,000.

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