Investors

Not until the middle of 1921 did the German people as a whole begin to realize what was going on. Then the mark had fallen to one-twentieth of its value. Exchange booths sprang up in public squares, railroad stations, banks. Germans found they could realize "profits" by buying foreign currency one day at one rate and selling it a few days later for several thousand marks more.

Germany became a debtor's paradise, a creditor's hell. Real-estate owners, big landlords, industrialists paid off loans and mortgages for a song; small savers, insurance holders, widows & orphans, whose inheritances had been invested in "safe" State bonds, were wiped out overnight.

At noon every day the mark's value was determined for the next 24 hours. Repair of shoes would cost 5,000,000 marks in the morning, 8,000,000 in the afternoon. Railroad tickets could be bought for only 50 miles at a time; the return trip was likely to cost quadruple the trip out. Students took their tuition fee to school every morning. By 1923 a box of matches sold for more marks than were in existence in prewar Germany. As the Reich's 1,783 State printing presses worked in three shifts, citizens toted their money about in specially made suitcases.

Meanwhile, auction houses sprang up at every corner. Farmers refused to sell their produce for such dubious exchange, traded milk, eggs, potatoes for pianos and fur coats. Dentists hoarded gold; china, rugs, pictures, electrical equipment, furniture were at a premium as Germans tried to put all their available cash in goods of intrinsic value. A nation's economic life disintegrated because its money went to pot.

Present Nazi rulers know that their people once bitten are twice shy. If Germans ever find their marks are worthless the Nazi regime may not long survive. So the Nazi Government, which has also run up an internal debt that it can scarcely hope to repay, this time has done so by forced loans and a thousand other expedients, but not by printing money. And yet Germans are beginning to have doubts about their money.

At Christmas the reliable Swiss news paper Die Neue Zuercher Zeitung noted that Germans were buying vacuum cleaners, kitchen utensils, lamps, radio sets, suit cases, purses, wallets out of all proportion to their past needs. Economics Minister Dr. Walther Funk publicly complained that people were investing their money in bathtubs. Last week an official anti-hoarding campaign began as stories were circulated of a woman who bought six electric carpet sweepers, of others who collected copper coins, fur coats, oriental rugs.

Das Schwarze Korps, the Elite Guard newsorgan which mixes its exhortations about a German super-race with sex crimes, nude pictures, free love and Jew-baiting, featured an article called Work More, Consume Less. It called those who spend unwisely saboteurs and said they would be dealt with.

The paper also outlined a plan to pay 10% of the wages of German workers in "promissory notes"--i.e., scrip. Half of it would go into savings banks for "investment" in war loans, half would be "lent" directly to the State's health and insurance agencies. In effect it would amount to an extra income tax.

Another trouble on the Nazi home front last week was cold. Official ration for coal is 50 small bricks weekly per household. With canals frozen and transportation tied up, not even this much was available. Even Berlin's largest, swankiest apartment houses were without heat. The city's well-heated hotels were packed.

The big question was whether the Germans have lived so long under war restrictions that further hardship cannot shake them, or whether having already suffered long, a little more anguish may be too much.

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