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Marxist. Under inflation "which only the Jews understood,"
they bled true Germans white by their scheming speculation. Somehow
or other they had something to do with the mountain of debt the Allies
piled on Germany. All these "facts" are profoundly
important in the Germany of today. They are at the root of national
resurgence. By blaming everything on their Jewish fellow men, other
Germans are escaping from their mental prison of inferiority. Louder
and louder the Minister of Propaganda dins with clenched and pounding
fists the exhortation he has thundered from half the platforms and over
all the radios in Germany: "Never forget it, comrades, and repeat
it a hundred times so you will say it in your dreams"THE JEWS ARE TO
BLAME!" Labor. Next to Bolshevism, brown-shirted Hitlerism is the
system of political thought which lays most stress on sheer work. But
there is a difference, subtle, personal. Josef Stalin, imperiously masculine,
commands and lays down as the essence of Sovietism every
citizen's NECESSITY TO WORK. Like a woman Chancellor Hitler prefers to
appeal rather than command. To a great audience of workers, mostly
young, mostly unemployed, he had the genius to cry "GERMANY
NEEDS YOU!" Today the old trade unions have been definitely
smashed and State-appointed "trustees of labor" dictate in
every industry wages and working hours. Official Nazi figures of the
registered unemployed show that they have been reduced from above
6,000.000 during the winter to below 5,000.000 in June. Last week,
however, neutral observers reckoned, despite the official figures, that
Germany's unemployment situation has grown worse since Chancellor
Hitler's rise to power. Totalitätstaat. Of Nazi achievements thus far
definitely the biggest has been to transform Germany from a republic of
federalized states into a tightly centralized regime in which all rival
parties are being rapidly squashed to make what Propagandist Goebbels
loves to vaunt as Der Totalitätstaat, the totalitarian or One Party
State. Even before the Reichstag met in Berlin's banner-hung Kroll
Opera House to vote the Hitler Cabinet supreme power (TIME, April 3),
the German Communist Party, third largest in the Reich, had been
outlawed by a Hindenburg decree. Prominent Socialists, men like
iron-jawed Otto Braun, for years Premier of Prussia, lied in panic to
Switzerland long before the Socialist Party was actually dissolved by
Nazi might (TiME, July 3). Last week with a dozen smaller parties
collapsing right and left, Germany reached the issue of whether the
Nationalist Party, always the stanchest supporter of President von
Hindenburg, could continue to exist. That issue was solved as
Chancellor Hitler flew to Neudeck. In Berlin the executives of the
Nationalist Party met behind locked doors, stared at each other with
haggard, questioning faces. What was there to do? The Press of the
Nationalist Party has been the Hugenberg Press. Now Dr. Hugenberg was
being forced out of the Cabinet and his papers would certainly be
stooped from championing Nationalists. In despair the executives
announced "The Nationalist Party is in voluntary dissolution."
Only one other German party of importance remained, the
Catholic Centrists. Hobbling into the fray last week club-footed Dr.
Goebbels (who won his Heidelberg doctor's degree on a Catholic
scholarship)
