"Vain and Futile"

Fresh from his war coverage in Leftist Spain quiet, hard-working Vincent Sheean, Left-wing author & correspondent, fortnight ago hurried to Vienna to scout reports of disaffection against the four-month-old Nazi regime. In a series of articles in the New York Herald Tribune last week Mr. Sheean gloomily summed up his investigations. "The impression made by ten days of observation of the new Vienna is that National Socialism has a firm grip on the life of the place and has come to stay. Terror reigns throughout the population and nobody dares give a plain answer to a plain question. . . . All the jails are full and the concentration camp at Dachau (near Munich) has grown to unwieldy proportions. . . . The total number placed in jails since March 12 (when Austria was annexed by the Reich) can hardly be less than 50,000 and is probably more."

This figure, calculated Correspondent Sheean, includes some 12,000 Roman Catholics, an additional 5,000 to 6,000 members of Ernst Rudiger Prinz von Starhemberg's Heimwehr, several hundred aristocrats, thousands of workers, trade-union leaders, Social Democrats and Communists, 20,000 Jews and 450 Austrian Nazis "purged" fortnight ago.

Far more disturbing to earnest Leftists than his estimate of 50,000 jailed was Correspondent Sheean's flat admission that the Nazi regime has won over Viennese workers. "The most important phenomenon but also one which has received the least attention is the power of the Nazis with the workers," wrote Sheean. "The proletariat of Vienna had little reason to love the last two regimes to which it was subjected [those of Chancellors Dollfuss and Schuschnigg]. The new regime appeals very powerfully to the whole lower middle class and to a great part of the workers. . . . Under the new regime the proletariat has been rapidly absorbed into . . . the Arbeitsfront [labor front]. . . .

Concluded Sheean: "The aristocrats. Jews, liberals and intellectuals, without much direct knowledge of the working class, tend to believe that the Viennese workers are anti-Nazi, but can never produce a shred of objective evidence to that effect. ... It is my impression that the Nazi control over Viennese workers is now already complete, and that any anti-Nazi hope, based on a supposed dissatisfaction of the proletarians, is vain and futile."

Belgium

Convival Sunday

Virtually all of Belgium's coal mine operators last week agreed to suspend operations on Mondays for the next few months. The reason: "Owing to the convival character of Sundays many mining districts have found Mondays not the most efficient day of the week."

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