"German Is the Saar!"

With each Saar vote costing officially $3, and unofficially no man knows what,* the world's highest-priced plebiscite was held this week with these results:

477,119 ballots for return of the Saar to Germany.

46,513 for retention of League of Nations rule over the Saar.

2,214 for annexation of the Saar by France.

With these returns in, just where was the Saar? The Treaty of Versailles, under which the plebiscite was held, does not provide that the returns shall have mandatory force. The votes so expensively obtained have the status of information presented to the Council of the League of Nations which must arrive independently at its own decision. Last week that awful MUST had the Council thoroughly scared. In Geneva politicians jibbered about how they might be held to blame for a war, should they decide about the Saar unwisely or too late. All of a twitter, Sir John Simon, highest-priced lawyer in the British Empire and His Majesty's Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, begged his Council colleagues to hand the Saar instantly to Germany should the plebiscite turn out to be the Nazi landslide Sir John expected. In a terrific state of nerves the Council, as usual in cases of supreme emergency, adjourned.

Stormy Socialist Max Braun, the German who has risked his life a thousand times in the past few months to organize Saar Socialists, Catholics and Communists in opposition to Saar Nazis, declared in his final appeal to Saarlanders to vote for the status quo! "We are Germans and we want eventually to return to Germany. But we are determined that the Saar shall not go to Hitler! There is a difference between Germany and Hitler. The Nazis pass, Germany remains!"

To the League Council persistent Herr Braun reported that last week Saar Nazis: 1) told Saar Jews "you will be safe after the plebiscite if your passport shows that you spent the entire day of the plebiscite in Germany and so can prove you did not vote"; 2) circulated to all Saarlanders a questionnaire to be collected by Saar Nazis the day after the plebiscite with these queries answered: "Did you vote? If not, why not? If so, how?" 3) systematically subjected to beatings Saarlanders suspected of intending to vote otherwise than for union with Germany.

Dispatches from neutral correspondents checked with these charges by Herr Braun. Anticipating a Nazi majority, he appealed to the League Council to "take into consideration the terroristic conditions amid which the plebiscite is held," in deciding what to do with the Saar. In Germany brownshirt wrath boiled when His Eminence Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber, Archbishop of Munich, defied Nazis who demanded that he order prayers for immediate return of the Saar to Germany. Instead His Eminence pointedly ordered two Pater Nosters and two Ave Marias "for the good of Germany."

When the Saar plebiscite commission asked France and Germany to desist from broadcasting Saar propaganda for 24 hours before the poll last week, Premier Pierre Etienne Flandin complied. Realmleader Adolf Hitler ordered every German station hooked into an unceasing day & night Saar broadcast, the usual time signals between programs being replaced by the first few bars of the plebiscite song, "GERMAN IS THE SAAR!"

After polling began. Saarlanders who had voted were rushed into Germany to broadcast back to the Saar that they had voted Nazi. Mistakes made by stupid early voters invalidating their ballots were explained in words of one syllable to prospective stupid late voters. German church bells were broadcast as "ringing in celebration of our plebiscite victory" before voting got well under way.

To complete the impression that the Saar was in his bag, Realmleader Hitler meanwhile appointed one of his oldest friends, Herr Josef Buerckel, a qualified German elementary schoolteacher, to be Governor of the Saar from the instant of victory. Accustomed to making himself clear to tiny tots, prospective Governor Buerckel repeated over & over before the microphone that the Saar will be different from the rest of Germany in that it will have no Nazi prison camps. Saar Jews, listening intently, could not quite make out whether Broadcaster Buerckel was promising them immunity, or merely that some of them would be sent to prison camps in Germany.

In Saarbruecken hard-jawed Hermann Roechling, Nazi industrialist, and reputed slush fund paymaster, snorted "Germany will not interfere with Saar Jews, Socialists and Communists! I suppose they will leave the Saar." After sleeping on this the Saar steel magnate said next day, according to a correspondent of London's Sunday Express, "A certain number of Communists will be sent to camps, unless they are converted into honest people. The 40,000 Saar unemployed will be mustered into the German Labor Front and set to building public works. A few foolish clergymen will be removed--by their Bishops, not by us! All members of the United Front will be isolated. We have promised not to do them any harm, but we have not promised to do them any good."

Thus the League Council is accurately informed what will happen should they give the Saar now to Germany. To withhold it, many Geneva statesmen feared, would touch off a Nazi invasion to seize the Saar. Even the supremely legal mind of Sir John Simon was not attracted, as it normally would have been, by the Treaty of Versailles' proviso that the Saar may be split or diced up into as many parts as the Council pleases, each part being given a different status, corresponding to the local vote. From a legal standpoint the League seemed duty-bound to give each part of the Saar what each part of the Saar wanted; but the League urge to make some sort of a clean sweep decision on the whole Saar was almost irresistible. So absorbed in plebiscitiana was Radcliffe College's famed Miss Sarah Wambaugh, super-active U. S. member of the Plebiscite Commission, that she announced, "The most important result is clear--not whether the territory will go to one country or the other country--but the successful co-operative effort of an impartial and scientific experiment! It proves that in the League of Nations we have adequate mechanism at our disposal for solving the intricate problems of our modern world."

*Some $2,500,000 was spent to check the 539,541 valid registrations (528,005 votes were cast, of which 2,249 were invalid); to set up 860 voting booths in 83 Saar voting areas; to furnish free rail and bus transport within the Saar from voters' homes to the place where they resided when the Treaty of Versailles was signed; and in salaries to 860 neutral poll watchers who were paid about $65 each for their services on the voting day, cheap at the price since they included 360 stolid, super-meticulous Dutch burgomasters. The troops supplied by Britain, Italy, The Netherlands and Sweden charged for their services only a sum representing the difference between what it would have cost to maintain them at home and the cost of transporting them to the Saar, maintaining them there.

Sub rosa expenditures by France and Germany, if each be found to have spent as much as the other charged, would pay a good part of Europe's War Debt. Neutral guessers figured the monster slush-funds around $50,000,000. Thus each ballot cost perhaps $63.

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