The old man had left Berlin two weeks ago, supposedly to doze out the summer at his big manor house in East Prussia, but suddenly last week German statesmen were startled to feel again the enormous weight in high politics of HINDENBURG.
Like Santa Claus the venerable Reichsprädsident never comes down the chimney in person, but like Santa Claus he has plenty of devoted henchmen to make his purposeful deliveries. If Adolf Hitler came home with a swelled head and hot new ideas for Dictatorship from his visit to Benito Mussolini (TIME, June 25). certainly last week he was dextrously chilled and shrunk—and by the very Hindenburg henchman who first presented him to the President, dapper, nonchalant Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen.
The chilling and shrinking were endowed with Hindenburg might when the President telegraphed "congratulations to my Vice-Chancellor and best comrade" after Lieut.-Colonel von Papen had dared to read to college students at Marburg the first candid and sweeping criticism of Nazi policies voiced by any German statesman since Hitler came to power.
Raking the brownshirts' vaunted "Totalitarian State" from stem to stern, von Papen flayed its muzzling of the Press, its meddling with religion, its encouragement of fanaticism and the drift toward radicalism of those Nazis who keep shouting for a Second Revolution. "Did we experience an anti-Marxist revolution," he barked, "only to carry out the program of Marxism?"
Finally von Papen appealed covertly for restoration of the Monarchy in words' plain to every German: "In my opinion the German state will at some future date find its crowning glory in a Chief of State who is removed once and for all from the political arena, from demagogy and from clashes among economic and vocational interests!"
After this challenge Chancellor Hitler, were he a real Dictator, would have been obliged to squelch Vice-Chancellor von Papen. Instead he presided over secret Cabinet negotiations in which von Papen, cool and supercilious, let his speech be attacked and defended by the Chancellor's hottest Left and Right fanatics, notably club-footed Minister of Propaganda & Public Enlightenment Dr. Paul Josef Goebbels and roaring, bull-necked General Hermann Wilhelm Göing, Premier of Prussia.
Goebbels on his own responsibility had already killed von Papen's speech out of second editions of German papers which had managed to rush it into their first, and Roarer Göing had as much as seconded von Papen in a speech admitting that enthusiasm for Naziism was some what on the wane. Amid this Cabinet broil Herr Hitler showed himself the Little Man. He begged everyone please to be friends and patched up a tea party in the Ministry of Propaganda at which Dr. Goebbels and Lieut.-Colonel von Papen sipped at each other with wolfish smiles while the world in general was defied to collect what Germany owes by Reichsbank President Dr. Hjalmar Schacht (see p. 17).