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The attendant surgeons glossed over the fact that he died of kidney trouble and that nemesis of most men past middle age, an atrophied prostate gland. They said that when they told him he must submit to certain treatments in order to get better, Old Paul growled, "Humph! Don't want to get any better."
When mourning Neudeck villagers were admitted they saw lying on the coverlet just below Old Paul's hands a piece of shrapnel which stunned him at the Battle of Koniggratz in 1866 when he was a dashing young lieutenant. In the rug on his study floor was a bullet hole made in 1922 by a burglar whose trigger finger contracted with terror as the householder he was robbing calmly switched on the light and announced "I am Hindenburg." Last week the Hindenburg family, prodded and hurried by Undertaker Goebbels, had to cut short the informal reception of Neu deck mourners to permit a mortician to prepare the remains of Old Paul for the dramatic funeral.
Tsar Schacht. In Berlin tense Adolf Hitler toiled to consolidate the supreme power he had seized. Asked if his new Caesarship is to last for life, he replied : "It will last until the basis of this Gov ernment is removed by a national vote." To get the plebiscite under way he ordered 40,000,000 ballots reading: "Do you German man, and do you German woman approve this law?" with a space to be marked ja or nein. These Germans will cast on Sunday, Aug. 19. In an effort to soothe world opinion Der Fuhrer an nounced: "We ask only that our present frontiers shall be maintained. . . . We shall not attack Austria. ... I would not sacrifice the life of one German to get any colony in the world. . . . Germany is ready to cooperate with other nations." Even amid such hectic politics, however, the Chancellor could not ignore last week the economic crisis which threatens to strangle Germany this winter.
Abruptly the Chancellor who had just seized all political power decided to concentrate all financial and economic power in one man. He already had a "Financial Tsar" in Dr. Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, President of the Reichsbank, and an "Economic Tsar" in Dr. Kurt Schmitt, Minister of Economics. Dr. Schmitt who fell ill recently has been fighting a gallant battle to save German trade in bed with a telephone at his elbow. Not repudiating Tsar Schmitt, Der Führer transferred his Economics Ministry for six months to Tsar Schacht who thus entered the Cabinet for the first time.
Promptly Dr. Schacht launched a doubly vigorous offensive to reduce imports and hang onto the last dollar, pound and franc of Germany's dwindling supply of foreign exchange. All raw materials, except iron and precious metals, were put under a drastic rationing system, every import shipment to be passed or rejected by experts of the Ministry of Economics. German municipalities which order clothing for their employes and Storm Troop commissariats were barred from purchasing pure woolen materials, ordered to insist on a mixture of wool and substitute fibres. Though Dr. Schacht's ruthless resourcefulness is well known, the immediate effect of making him a Double Tsar last week was to start such a run by private citizens to buy up and hoard anything likely to be of value that savings bank deposits dropped throughout the Reich.