"Putsch!" Seventeen times during one night last week Berlin policemen rapped thunderously upon the doors of prominent Monarchists, burst in when they were not instantly admitted, ransacked.
Documents and other evidence thus collected enabled the Polizei to announce proudly that they had nipped a most elaborate Monarchist Putsch. "Exhibit A" was a large autographed portrait of Wilhelm of Doorn, with a note of glowing encouragement attached.
The scheme, as revealed, was designed to operate, if possible, without bloodshed, along semi-constitutional lines. The Cabinet was first to be unhorsed in the Reichstag and President von Hindenburg pressed to call in as Chancellor the arch-Monarchist Dr. Neumann, who was then to form a Cabinet from such notorious Fascists as Dr. Alfred Hugenberg, "the German Northcliffe," subsidizer of numerous Monarchist papers, and General von Moehl, one of the most ruthless of soldiers.
The final step was to be the exaction of President von Hindenburg's resignation, thus automatically causing a Monarchist Chancellor to assume the executive power, after which martial law would be declared on some pretext and an "emergency constitution" proclaimed, setting up a "regency" for the Hohenzollerns.
Forewarned of the police raids, all but one of the important Putsch plotters quietly "went abroad". Unlucky Colonel von Luck, head of the Olympic (Militarist) Athletic Club, was arrested, jailed.
"Flagged Out!" The Putsch scare was aggravated last week by the occurrence of the identical event planned as the first step in its accomplishment — the fall of Chancellor Hans Luther's Cabinet.
This actually resulted from a totally different cause, grew out of a squabble originally little noticed by the press — the so-called "German flag controversy" (TIME, May 17).
The imperial flag (black, white and red) was, as everyone knows, displaced by the Republican flag (black, red and gold) through the action of the National Assembly at Weimar in 1919. Recently the Luther Cabinet ordered that the merchant marine flag (black, white and red with a tiny black, red and gold field in the staff corner) should also be flown by German diplomatic and consular offices. This flag was denounced as "nine-tenths Imperial and only one-tenth Republican" by the Left parties; and last week Chancellor Luther was savagely interpellated about it in the Reichstag.
Herr Luther chances to possess more ability than wit. His enemies succeeded in making it appear that the Cabinet had taken a momentous decision detrimental to the Reich without consulting the Reichstag. Flustered, Herr Luther attempted to evade collision by announcing that he would postpone the execution of the flag order until August. Then, witless, he offered the ridiculous explanation that several months' time would be needed to communicate the order to German consulates in different parts of the world.
The dam of ridicule and laughter burst. Herr Luther's delighted enemies roared. Soon the Reichstag passed 176* to 146† (with 103 abstentions) a motion introduced by the Democrats censuring Herr Luther personally and incidentally puffing President von Hindenburg.