Bad News

The worst break the Berlin Stock Exchange has suffered under Adolf Hitler shrank the prices of leading issues by some 7% one day last week. A prime German blue chip, Vereinigte Stahl Werke (United Steel Works), dipped for the first time in several years below its par of 100 marks per share. None doubted that without the strict Nazi control of German finance the break would have been even worse. Although prices later recovered perhaps half their losses last week, as the Reichsbank strongly supported blue chips, the mood of the average German investor had turned deeper blue.

Aside from the stockmarket, official Nazi statistics showed last week that the shrinking foreign trade of Greater Germany has now reached a volume slightly less than the trade of Germany alone before Austria was absorbed. The comfortable surplus of Reich exports over imports last year has now become a deficit of some $40,000,000. If the future looked rosy even to Economic Four-Year-Plan Administrator General Hermann Wilhelm Goering, he would hardly have issued, as he did last week, a decree obliging everyone in Germany to turn over every last gold coin to the State, as did Franklin Roosevelt four years ago. Mostly such coins are ten and 20-mark gold pieces of the German Empire.

Army Commander-in-Chief Adolf Hitler made public on the day of the market break a decree providing in detail for army billeting and requisitions in Germany in case of war. "The common weal takes precedence over all private gain," says this decree; army officers "may demand from any person subject to this law that he permit the use of objects he owns or holds for safe keeping, or that he transfer his rights to movable objects" such as automobiles or trucks. Payment for services required of civilians is to be made only "in so far as the services cannot justifiably be expected to be rendered free."

This decree, coordinating and bringing up to date ordinances dating in Austria back to 1897, in Germany back to 1868, did not make bullish reading for German investors. They remember how in 1914 much German smart money took its prof its and got out of the market just before the War. Nazi newsorgans attributed last week's break to: 1) turning of securities into cash by German firms desirous of raising further working capital amid the Rearmament scramble; 2) forced sales by Jews squeezed in Vienna and elsewhere in Germany by fresh "Aryanization" measures, one of which excludes Jewish brokers from stock exchanges in the Reich.

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