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Price Commissioner. Most important of all, Dr. Karl Goerdeler, until last week the little known Burgomaster of Leipzig, was given a post new to capitalist countries. If lawmaking could do it, Chancellor Bruning was bound to reduce living costs in Germany last week. Government salaries were slashed 10%. Wages in private industry were ordered reduced to the Tan 10, 1927 level. House rents were ordered reduced 10% to 15%. Retail prices of standardized articles were ordered reduced 10% and Dr. Goerdeler was appointed Price Commissioner, given autocratic powers to see that these decrees were enforced.
Muzzle. The Bruning Dictatorship did not stop its attack on the Hitler advance there. Adolf Hitler was scheduled to make a radio address to the U. S. The German Government forbade it. Prussian Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Karl Severing was called into consultation; a lengthy meeting was held to decide whether the Government dared expel Fascist Hitler from Germany without bringing on the long-feared revolution.
Der Führer-Foreign correspondents are prone to make too much of the fact that Adolf Hitler was born in Austria, that he has never established his right to German citizenship. As a matter of fact Adolf Hitler was born just 62 mi. due east of Munich in the Austrian frontier town of Braunau and always considered himself more Bavarian than Austrian. Fascist Hitler discourages reference to his early life, not because there was anything shameful about it, but merely because it was not sufficiently romantic for Der Führer, the Leader of the Nazis. His father was a customs inspector. Young Adolf was educated in the village school and tried various jobs: housepainting, carpentry, lock-smithery. draughting.
At the beginning of the War he lost his Austrian citizenship by enlisting in the German Army as a private, served with distinction, was once wounded and once gassed. He left the trenches firmly convinced that Germany's defeat and the breakdown of the Empire were due to the Communists and Jewish profiteers.
In 1922 he first emerged as a political figure in Catholic, reactionary Munich. Small, sparse Adolf Hitler with the little mustache and the great, rasping voice had gained the moral and financial support of General Erich Ludendorff, once Germany's most brilliant commander, already beginning to suffer from the delusions that led him to take up alchemy and the worship of Woden. In Munich the Hitler Brown Shirts first appeared; the Hitler symbol, the ancient swastika; and the Hitler doctrine which included disfranchising Jews, repudiation of the Treaty of Versailles and Reparations; death to all Communists, and the abolition of department stores.
In November 1923 occurred the famous Beer Putsch, when Adolf Hitler in a black frock coat, scowling over his smudge of a mustache, marched into the biggest beer garden in Munich, the "Burgerbraukeller," and proclaimed the National Socialist Revolution. There was a riot in the Odeonplatz. Adolf Hitler fled to the mountain village of Uffing and took refuge in the cottage of a devoted follower: Ernst Fritz Hanfstaengel, Harvard 1909, one-time Manhattan art dealer.