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Amid transports of joy Chancellor Hitler announced that henceforth the Reichstag will no longer meet in liberal, proletarian Berlin but in imperial, aristocratic Potsdam. On April 1 the new Reichstag will convene for business in the Garrison Church at Potsdam, a national military shrine in which Frederick the Great lies buried.
General Massacre? Meanwhile Russian, French, Scandinavian and British newspapers reached press-gagged Berlin with reports that it was not Communisms but the Nazis themselves who fired the Berlin Reichstag—for reasons only too obvious.
The British Press, led by the London Times, went even further in accusation. Said the Times: "The threat of a general massacre of political opponents [by the Nazis] might have been dismissed two months ago as crude bravado but cannot be rated so lightly now. . . . Although the rumors may prove unfounded, they continue to reach England from several good sources." London's Daily Herald, one-time organ of James Ramsay MacDonald, now of the British Labor Party, declared: "A quarter-million Nazi storm troops, including desperate characters over whom even Chancellor Hitler cannot exercise control, will, it is stated, invade the large towns of Prussia and slaughter all progressive leaders and Jews of whom, both men and women, a long list has already been prepared."
Meeting hastily, the Hitler Cabinet discussed measures to expel from Germany all foreign correspondents, did not quite dare last week. Eager to catch a Red, several of the new "auxiliary police'' stormed the apartment of Dr. Lily Keith, Berlin representative of the Moscow Izvestia, while she telephoned the Soviet Ambassador. Bursting in. the "auxiliaries" ransacked Dr. Keith's rooms for two hours, dragged her off to jail. After the Soviet Government had officially demanded Correspondent Keith's release, she was turned loose. Meanwhile more than 350 German Communists (including Reichstag Deputies) were jailed and Berlin police boasted that if Professor Albert Einstein should return from California they could arrest him since he had once supported Communism by testifying for a Communist in court.
Hitler. The life of Adolf Hitler can be summed up in a few snapshot scenes:
1919. In the middle of a dreary Munich bedroom floor two mice nibble every morning at a piece of sugar set out for them by one Adolf Hitler, Austrian-born veteran of the Imperial German Army, wounded, gassed, Iron Crossed. Six other men as obscure as himself suggest that he join their German Labor Party, give him Membership Card No. 7, written in longhand. Meeting on Wednesday, the Executive Committee of the Party elect No. 7 their Chief of Propaganda, are amazed when he rounds up a meeting of 130, flabbergasted when he sweeps all before him with a loose but passionate 20-min. speech bursting with personal magnetism.