Sub-Dictator

(See front cover)

Italy has no No. 2 Fascist, no political heir apparent to Benito Mussolini, but in Berlin high-pitched, vegetarian, nonsmoking Adolf Hitler knows only too well the sumptuous apartment of the bass-voiced, carnivorous, robust No. 2 Nazi.

One room in the apartment is a shrine. Its stained glass window shows the angelic likeness of a fair young woman dead now about two years. As the bride of Captain Hermann Wilhelm Goering she lived barely a year, failed tt) see his triumphal emergence this spring as Premier of Prussia (which is nearly two-thirds of Germany) and the wild, popular acclaim which marks him wherever he goes throughout the Fatherland today as the No. 2 Nazi.

To conceive of Prussia in terms of the U. S. one must picture a state so colossal as to spread from the Atlantic Seaboard as far west as Wyoming, a state so potent as to include the nation's Capital, leading mines and industries and major agricultural areas. To be Premier of Prussia is in Germany far more than to be in the U. S. Governor of the State of New York. Starting out as Kings of Prussia, the Hohenzollerns welded the rest of the Fatherland around them as the German Empire. They struck the national keynote with Prussian kultur. Prussia today is more than ever the dynamic centre of the Reich. Recently the drastic activities of Prussian Premier Goering have eclipsed German Chancellor Hitler's broader but less intense efforts to "coordinate" the whole Reich. Last week Widower Goering was pushing to completion a breathtakingly bold series of experiments in Prussian government:

Death to Dissenters. Starting with the state mechanism for suppression of crime and calling in Prussian Minister of Justice Hans Kerrl, Premier Goering drafted a set of laws which his Cabinet promptly adopted by decree. These provide the death penalty for attempts on the life of Nazi officials in Prussia, for "subversive activity," and for the spreading of greuel-geschichten ("atrocity stories"). The new laws also vest in Premier Goering personally more authority to pardon than was possessed by the King of Prussia.

Making clear that Prussia will ruthlessly suppress Jews, Communists or even Nazi Storm Troopers who show symptoms of disobedience. Premier Goering declared: "I have determined to intervene with an iron fist! ... It has been shown that the enemies of the State were only pretending to be dead. . . . Whoever in the future lays violent hands on an official of the State, a policeman or a Storm Trooper, must know that he will pay for it in the briefest possible time. ... It is entirely beside the point whether the act is followed by death or merely leads to injury."

Amnesty to Dodgers. Since Prussia was governed by German Socialists from 1920 until last year, Premier Goering is trying the experiment of offering wealthy folk who dodged Socialist taxes an opportunity to win amnesty for their past misdeeds by solid support of the Nazi Prussian State--contributions to the Nazi Party being implied, though of course not stated in Captain Goering's declaration.

"Observation of our economic life," said he. "has shown that, in the days before the Nazi Party took over power, deeds were committed in industrial circles which, in effect, violated the penal laws and yet were perpetrated without any self-seeking motives.

"The 'tax Bolshevism' of the Prussian State then existing forced many men, for the sake of keeping their concerns going, to embark on courses of action which were then illegal but are now understandable. ...

In every case where the crime was committed to meet a pressing need I propose to inquire whether I cannot, by quashing legal proceedings or granting a pardon, make it possible for the culprit to take part once more, with his head high, in the battle against economic misery!"

Discreetly behind a cloud of Prussian censorship last week Minister of Justice Kerrl and Premier Goering were making it possible for scores if not hundreds of wealthy tax-dodgers to hold their heads high.

Summus Episcopus. During the German Protestant Church struggle between Nazi and non-Nazi factions (TIME, June 12, et seq.) Premier Goering pitched in by announcing that he had assumed the ancient religious title of the Kings of Prussia, Summns Episcopus of the Prussian Protestant Church. By virtue of this office Captain Goering kept up maximum Nazi pressure on Protestants in Prussia, during and after the carefully fixed church plebiscite which was "won" by the Nazi "German Christians" (TIME, July 31). Fortnight ago the church elders elected as 'Primate of Prussia" at Premier Goering's behest Nazi Army Chaplain Ludwig Mueller who is Catholic Chancellor Hitler's candidate for eventual election as Reichsbischof or "Bishop of the United German Evangelical Church." Both No. 1 Nazi Hitler and No. 2 Nazi Goering like Chaplain Mueller's deftness in de-Semitizing the Bible. "There can be no greater opposition," cried Chaplain Muller in a recent sermon, "than between Judaism and the Savior! Christianity did not arise from Judaism. On the contrary, Jesus Christ died struggling against Judaism."

Last week Premier Goering, who has already barred Jews from all the higher offices in Prussia, issued a decree requiring even municipal authorities to furnish evidence that neither they nor their spouses possessed so much as a single Jewish grandparent. By another decree he barred from Prussia's high schools and universities "all Marxist and antinational students," an order sure to be enforced in such a way as to bar Jews--since Nazis hold that Jews are all antinational internationalists.

In all public schools, teachers and pupils were ordered to greet each other with the Nazi salute and zealous Prussian Minister of Education Bernhard Rust even overstepped the bounds of his authority to extend this salute order to all adults in the State. "The salute is to be expected of every German," read Minister Rust's exuberant order. "Irrespective of whether he is a member of the National Socialist Party or not he will respect this form of greeting as a symbol of the new Germany."

"Killjoys." On the labor front Premier Goering has taken steps to squash "defeatism," denning it as "any kind of work or deed that is contrary to praise of the present regime. . . . Persons making such remarks may be designated as killjoys. . . . Killjoys will be treated as camouflaged Marxists" [i. e. marched off to Nazi prison camps].

"All officials, employes and workers," ordered Premier Goering, "shall watch for killjoys and report them. Failure to make such charges will be regarded as a demonstration of solidarity with the killjoys or agitators."

"Miracle of East Prussia." Since such threats, typical of Nazi efforts to deal with serious problems by verbiage, have not improved employment in Prussia generally, a dramatic campaign was being urged forward in East Prussia last week by Premier Goering to make a great show of "obliterating unemployment."

Normally at the harvest season East Prussia imports laborers from adjoining Poland. This year 24,000 Prussian unemployed have been bundled into trains, shipped across the Polish Corridor in freight cars of the German State Railways, and put to work in East Prussia. Making much of this achievement Premier Goering has encouraged Berlin newspapers to print stories about how he and his protege, Governor Erich Koch of East Prussia, have there "performed the miracle of ending unemployment."

In Berlin last week Premier Goering had so stamped his dominance upon the capital that he felt safe in ordering disbanded on Aug. 15 the "auxiliary Prussian police" enrolled from Nazi Storm Troops six months ago and hotly protested in Geneva by France and her allies as "disguised soldiers violating the Treaty of Versailles." How many such troops or police there may have been is Premier Goering's secret. He said 30,000 last week, but protest estimates have always been at least 200,000.

Hero Goering. On the platform deep-chested Premier Goering roars thrillingly, paternally about "My People!" He strikes with peculiar effectiveness the Nazi keynote that beaten Germany is now in a period of glorious Resurgence.

Every German knows that Captain Goering is an authentic ace hero of the Imperial air force, received Germany's grotesquely French-named Ordre Pour Le Merite from Kaiser Wilhelm. After Allied airmen shot down the late great Baron von Richthofen he became commander of the Richthofen Escadrille.

Less well known is the fact that Ace Goering, after the signing of the Armistice, refused to deliver to the Allies the planes he commanded, disobeyed his own German superior officers and hopped from city to city with the remnants of the Richthofen Escadrille until he finally ran out of gasoline and supplies in Aschaffenburg. That night, in the local Rathaus, Captain Goering took leave of his airmen with a toast which probably expresses his feelings to this day: "We must be proud of that which we have done! We must desire that another such struggle shall arise. We must never forget that desire!"

Completely shattered in spirit for a time by Germany's defeat, Hero Goering is reputed to have taken to narcotics. His 210-lb. physique rallied, however, and he was with General Erich Ludendorff and Propagandist Adolf Hitler when they staged their abortive "beer hall putsch" in Munich in 1923. Unlike Ludendorff & Hitler who were uninjured and won popular acclaim at their trial, Captain Goering was wounded in the fracas and smuggled out of Germany by friends. In Sweden, where he worked as a flying instructor, he met his future bride, a daughter of Swedish Baron Fock. He did not marry her until he had returned to Germany under a political amnesty and again joined Adolf Hitler, become a Reichstag Deputy in 1928.

Popular at once among the new crop of Nazis, Deputy Goering was elected Speaker of the Reichstag (TIME, Sept. 12). In the final period of jockeying for power, Speaker Goering was called "the diplomat of the Nazi Party," negotiated frequently with the entourage of President von Hindenburg who was brought with difficulty to stomach Adolf Hitler. Once the Hitler Cabinet was formed Captain Goering became first Minister Without Portfolio, then as a matter of course Air Minister and finally obtained the Premiership of Prussia amid quickly spiked rumors that he might soon succeed in ousting Chancellor Hitler. Brooding over his dead Swedish bride was said to have sent Captain Goering back to opiates. French journalists call him spitefully "Goering, the dope fiend." German pilots scoff, call their Air Minister "now completely cured," boast that "in skill he ranks with Balbo," while French Air Minister Pierre Cot has barely learned to fly (TIME, Aug. 14). Chancellor Hitler, who takes few chances, never hesitates to let Captain Goering take the joystick of his private plane.

Lately Premier Goering has embarked on a dashing second bachelorhood, strutting in unique uniforms of his own design (TIME, Aug. 14), giving lavish parties, installing himself in a vast new office "like Mussolini's" and even sprucing up the coat of arms of the State of Prussia.

"The proud Prussian eagle, which led the regiments of Frederick the Great from victory to victory," he declared, "had to surrender the sword and the lightning," removed from its talons on the Prussian coat of arms by the Socialists. "Now the sword and the lightning are coming back to the talons of the Prussian eagle--the sword as a sign that we want Security for our people; the lightning as a sign that he who should dare try to destroy Germany again would be hit by the lightning of this Prussian eagle!"

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