Hitler Hobby

Last week, at the Berlin Automobile Show, for the second time in a year Adolf Hitler posed alongside a gleaming sample of his $396 Strength Through Joy flivver. Well did he know, but nothing did he say about the wretchedly slow progress in production of the Volkswagen, which was conceived more than five years ago but will not be on the market until 1940.

Far more gratifying to the Fuehrer and Nazi patriots was the progress made in striping Germany with the finest highspeed road system (Reichsautobahnen) in the world. For last week any German motorist could drive from the Baltic Sea at Travemuende to Salzburg, at the foot of the Alps, without slowing for cross traffic or tooting his horn for an intersection. With almost the same ease, he could start at Cologne, near the Belgian border, zip past Berlin and wind up at the Polish frontier.

From Berlin, centre of the Autobahnen, Herr Hitler's workers had also laid highspeed roads to Falkenburg, within 95 miles of the Polish Corridor; to Hamburg, in the northwest corner of the Reich; to Saarbruecken on the French frontier; to Munich in the south and Vienna in the southeast. As Herr Hitler was opening the Auto Show, 300,000 workmen were resting in 218 barrack towns for the next day of digging, blasting and concrete-pouring on Autobahnen in every quarter of the Reich, even in East Prussia, on the other side of the Polish Corridor.

Hitler himself turned the first spadeful of dirt for the Autobahnen in 1933. By last year's end, 1,903 miles of the road system had been completed. Neither

Anschluss, the CzechoSlovak grab nor construction of the Siegfried Line was permitted to interfere with the road building, which will be continued until 8,500 miles are completed.

Slickly engineered, with a minimum of turns and steep grades, the twin three-lane strips of the Autobahnen are separated by a hedged and grassed parkway 16 feet wide, which keeps traffic separated and cuts down headlight glare. Service stations, hotels, repair shops and rest stations are spaced along the highway with Teutonic regularity (26 miles between filling stations) and at even intervals there is a blackboard to call motorists to the phone for messages from home or summonses to emergency military duty.

Much more than speedways for vacationing Nazis, the Autobahnen have potent military significance. Logistics experts calculate that soldiers with all their impedimenta can be trucked over any stretch of the system, using only one strip, at the rate of 72,000 an hour. Thus German officers, particularly those of the younger, mechanized generation, are convinced that the Autobahnen will supplant railroads as the prime mode of wartime transport.

Unless Herr Hitler changes his policy this will be necessarily true, for while canals and airways have prospered under the Nazis, along with highways, railroads have gone to pot. German State Railways, once the snappiest system in Europe, is no longer able to handle its traffic.

Never quite recovered from reparations days, when France and Belgium pinched the best of its equipment, German State Railways was in critical condition when Germany annexed Austria and threw on its back the burden of the dilapidated Austrian Federal Railways. On some of the hopelessly debt-burdened Austrian lines wood-burners were still being used.

Sunk for fair, German State Railways today manages to run within three or four hours of schedule, hauls 8,000 carloads of freight daily to the Siegfried Line, does the best it can to move millions of German workers and political delegates around the country free of charge, to an endless succession of congresses and demonstrations.

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