At Nurnberg

With 1,500,000 Germans armed, mobilized and ready at the frontiers of their country to attack or defend, Adolf Hitler mobilized another 1,500,000 Germans in Nuernberg last week. He then proceeded to turn the annual Nazi Party Congress into a great, step-by-step building of war fright throughout Europe. The evident object was to bluff Czechoslovakia and her friends into the best possible deal for the Sudeten Germans and give Hitler another triumph to flash before his people.

The earth-shaking thud of thousands of large feet goose-stepping at Nuernberg; gargantuan mass drills with shovels, guns, artillery, war planes, brass bands, dumbbells; a solemn annual service for dead Nazi martyrs--these the world hardly noticed, for everywhere people asked "War?" and tried to read the answer in the Nuernberg speeches of Big Nazis.

Adolf Hitler, supreme showman and orchestrator of his masses, conducted his psychological offensive like a composition by his thunderous favorite, Richard Wagner. It began with a Hitler proclamation, intended to be soothing, in which the Fuehrer expressed to the German people "in my name and in yours how deeply happy we are" that Italy has begun to take measures against the Jews. Soothingly the Proclamation told Germans that they need not be alarmed by the weakness of their stockmarket and other signs of economic strain: "German economy is being so constructed that at any time it can be completely independent from other countries. . . . This is succeeding. The idea of blockading Germany can be buried as an entirely ineffective weapon. We have no more worries about food!"

If 74,000,000 Germans believed this, Psychologist Hitler had laid the haunting ghost of the Fatherland--the fear of millions that another War would throw Germany back into the misery and semi-starvation of 1918. In Nuernberg, the Sudeten Germans' "Little Fuehrer" Konrad Henlein suddenly arrived to confer with the Big Fuehrer, went to bed with a very bad cold. Envoys of the Great Powers were received at tea by strict Teetotaler Hitler, and British Ambassador Sir Nevile Henderson was tantalized by not being able to talk to the Dictator before so many people about anything important. Tantalized Sir Nevile remained for days in Nuernberg, telling every prominent Nazi except Hitler what His Majesty's Government "might" do if actual war broke out. But French Ambassador Andre Franc,ois-Poncet got something interesting from the Dictator when Herr Hitler responded to some remarks from the Ambassador by observing: "I trust that no mother will ever have cause to weep in consequence of any action of mine." Henchmen of Hitler whispered that earlier that day he had sent Henlein back to Prague with the smooth advice, "Ask for more--and you will get it."

Next Nuernberg number was 180,000 husky, two-fisted, district leaders of the Nazi Party from all over the Reich. "I could blindly depend on you!" the Fuehrer told them with rising fervor, "[Germany] is determined to capitulate to no one!"

After the district leaders came 38,000 children who piped ecstatically, "We thank our Fuehrer" after a speech in which he told them: "When Providence takes me from my people I will hand to the next Fuehrer a country welded by iron bonds." A bit more volume was turned on as No. 3 Nazi Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels made a screaming oration to Party officials in which he flayed former U. S. Ambassador to Germany Dr. William E. Dodd and climaxed "President Benes of Czechoslovakia owes his election to the Communist vote!" Then, Der Fuehrer signaled fortissimo, and beefy, bull-voiced No. 2 Nazi Hermann Wilhelm Goering tore into a two-hour speech of such exhausting fury that afterwards his doctors rushed him out of Nuernberg suffering from what they said was acute sore throat and inflamed lymph glands in his right leg. The General, the doctors added, could not be expected to recover amid all the noise and excitement of Nuernberg, so they bundled him into a quiet village overnight, then allowed him to return to Berlin.

In working himself up to this breakdown, Orator Goering cried: "We want peace but Versailles took peace out of the world! . . . We can always shoot but we never get jittery . . . God is kind! . . . Our air force justifies unshakable confidence in victory and our fortifications in the west will halt any power under the sun!"

General Goring is chief of the German Four-Year Plan and he roared defiance at whoever describes as "forced labor" the new ten-hour day which Germans have to work on armaments and fortifications, in many cases lodged in barracks distant from their homes. "If I take men from their homes and families it is for their own and their children's good!" shouted the General. "I take everything! I need everything! . . . We shall go on economizing. He who throws away the tinfoil of a cigaret packet is a dirty dog! . . . I hear that some people without public spirit are hoarding banknotes. Let them be warned that these might be repudiated overnight!" The speech was on such a plane of fury that it sounded as if the No. 2 Nazi wanted more than war upon Czechoslovakia which he contemptuously called "that little chit of a race devoid of culture!" Behind Prague, General Goering said, he saw "Moscow and the eternal Jewish devil's grimace!"

If Adolf Hitler had wanted to surpass this Goering speech, his own final declaration closing the Congress this week would have had to take Germany from words to action, and in Europe the masses had feared that with this speech the Fuehrer might unleash war. However, a symphony rarely ends by blowing all the biggest horns, nor has Adolf Hitler ever up to now rattled to give notice before one of his lightning strikes, such as seizing Austria. His words this week simply advanced the German psychological offensive to a new stage.

"Self-Determination!" Orator Hitler began by attacking democratic states as being bedfellows in the League of Nations with Soviet Russia, "which maintains its rule by shootings and tortures." Only in Germany and Italy, he cried, were the people 99% behind their governments. He branded Czechoslovakia as a pseudo-democracy forcibly created by the Treaty of Versailles, and accused former French Air Minister Pierre Cot of having once said: "The task of Czechoslovakia in a future war will be to bomb the key industries of Germany."

In a characteristic Hitler digression of great length Der Fuehrer passionately insisted that last May the President of Czechoslovakia "lied" in saying Germany had mobilized, making this his reason for a Czech mobilization. The fact that last week Germany was fully mobilized and Czechoslovakia had not mobilized, Orator Hitler ignored, shouting: "Not a single German soldier was mobilized in May! . . . That lie was invented to serve the criminal purposes of one State--Czechoslovakia, which was then ready to plunge the world into war. . . . I declare that the German Government will not tolerate such action for a second time!"

This seemed to mean that Germany will attack Czechoslovakia if she should mobilize, and Herr Hitler next plunged into telling Germans how "278,000 men are now working to fortify our western frontier which will be ready before winter!" Having thus suggested that Germany is not yet quite ready to fight, Der Fuehrer swung into a threatening conclusion in which he vented his rage at President Benes' offer of 700,000,000 koruny as a pacifier to the Sudeten Germans (see p. 18).

"It is not up to Herr Benes," shouted the Dictator, "to give the Sudeten Germans gifts. What the Germans demand is the right of self-determination. . . . The talks and half-promises of Benes cannot go on any longer. . . . President Benes has engaged in tactics showing that he desires to negotiate under the methods of the League of Nations--that cannot go on forever. . . . In Palestine the Arabs stand defenseless, and perhaps deserted. The Sudeten Germans are neither defenseless nor deserted. . . . I serve peace if I leave no doubt that the oppression of 3,500,000 Sudeten Germans is to end and be replaced by the free right of self-determination. I should be sorry if our relations with other European nations suffered--but the guilt is not ours."

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