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"The victorious German revolution has entered upon a stage of evolution," wrote Dr. Frick. "That means normal, legal, constructive work. This task must be seriously endangered if there is a continuance of revolution or talk of a second revolution. Whosoever talks of such must understand he is thereby revolting against his leader and will be dealt with accordingly. . . . From now on power rests with the Government and with the Government alone!" Sure, perhaps prematurely, that German business is really going to be largely let alone by the Nazi State, Dr. Gustav Krupp von Bohlen lent eager aid to a Nazi press campaign which sought to pretend last week that such interference had never existed. Speaking at Hamburg he recalled that one of his great grandfathers. Brigadier General Henry Bohlen of Philadelphia, died during the Civil War near Kelly's Ford on the Rappahannock. "I appeal," cried Gustav Krupp von Bohlen, "for American understandingsympathetic understandingof Germany!" Soon afterward Chancellor Hitler placed the Fatherland's great industrialists on his right hand last week. He created and attached to his Cabinet an advisory Economic Council on which Munitions Tycoon Krupp von Bohlen will rub elbows with Electric Tycoon Carl Friedrich von Siemens and Steel Tycoon Fritz Thyssen. This was all very well for German business with a big "B" but in politics the Cabinet proceeded to carry on with arbitrary violence. Thirty laws were decreed at a single Cabinet sitting between 11 a. m. and midnight. Mainly these were aimed at "hostile and disloyal" Germans, particularly those who have fled the country, mostly Jews, Communists and Socialists. By a stroke of the Chancellor's pen the Cabinet seized power to deprive all such persons of German citizenship and confiscate their property. "What we shall take from the Jews," grinned an indiscreet Treasury official, "will be a big help in balancing the budget." Even before the Cabinet decrees passed, uniformed Prussian police pounced last week on five relatives of pouchy-eyed old Philipp Scheidemann, the Socialist who proclaimed the German Republic in 1918, served as its first Chancellor and recently fled to Czechoslovakia. On no charge whatever the five relatives were locked up in a Nazi prison camp. Refusing to reveal their names, police said their sex was "predominantly male." They will be held, it was explained, because Herr Scheidemann recently wrote an article for the New York Times in which he asked: "Will the world tolerate in the centre of Europe the domination of political adventurers and criminals who trample under foot law. right, art and science, and play with incendiary torches around a powder keg? No! A thousand times no! It must be the task of the entire civilized world to paralyze these adventurers. That this may not exclude a bloody war is self evident!" This last sentence the Nazi Press called a treasonable incitement to other nations to make war on Germany. In Prague broken old Philipp Scheidemann declared that he had never written treason. He blamed his translator. He appealed to high heaven but he failed to get his five completely innocent relatives out of their barbed-wire prison camp.
