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Tycoons & Junkers. When worried President von
Hindenburg let "Safeguard Minister" Dr. Hugenberg go last
week he withdrew support from Germany's most pampered class—his
closest friends and neighbors, the East Prussian Junkers (landed
proprietors). The Junkers, sunk as a class in debt, have clung to their
lands for years through special Government grants of credit and decrees
to block foreclosure. Chancellor Hitler appointed as Minister of
Agriculture a Nazi famed as "The Friend of the Small Farmer,"
Herr Walter Darré. As every Junker knows Herr Darré
regards their class as a feudal excrescence on new Germany.
Sermonlike, his pamphlets all have lengthy titles impressive to yokels,
such as A New Aristocracy, But Of The Blood And The Soil and The Peasantry
As The Living Spring Of The Nordic Race. With Herr Darré in
the saddle last week Old Paul's Junker friends seemed doomed.
Agriculture was only half of Dr. Hugenberg's Ministry. Economics,
the other half. Chancellor Hitler split off last week and placed in charge of a steady-going German
insurance tycoon, Dr. Kurt Schmitt. There was, however, a catch. Dr.
Schmitt, a man of no political prestige, will have as his
Undersecretary and mentor famed Gottfried Feder, the "Nazi
Ideologist," inventor of the Party's distinction between two kinds of
capital: raffendes or "grasping loan capital" and schaffendes or
"creative industrial capital." In practice this distinction means that
a Jewish lender or an industrialist who does not contribute to Nazi
funds is liable to be denounced as a Shylock with raffendes Kapital
while non-Jews and regular contributors-to-the-party are left unmolested
with their schaffendes wealth. Last week Germany's tycoons,
whose business is increasingly regulated by the Ministry of Economics,
shivered at the prospect that so loose and ingenuous a thinker as Herr
Feder should have so much power. German industry today is described
by Berlin economists as "stagnant." It needs the life blood of
fresh capital. German capitalists, whose deposits abroad run into
billions, are unlikely to bring much of this money home while they do
not know from one day to the next whether a man's capital is really
schaffendes and good or likely to be reclassified as raffendes, with
ensuing Nazi reprisals. Prominent Nazis like Dr. Goebbels have of
course no worries about whether their capital is schaffendes or
raffendes. They can do no wrong. "The Doctor" lives in
markedly sumptuous style with his beauteous wife, their baby
daughter, and her little son by a previous marriage. When enemies
charged that Frau Goebbels is distantly descended from a Jewish
family named Friedlander, "The Doctor" produced no evidence
but flew into a towering, effective rage. "Let whosoever desires to do
so look upon my wife!" he challenged. "Let them
convince themselves with their own eyes of her non-Jewish
origin!" "WE DEMAND!" Unable, like the Roosevelt regime,
to show an upturn in national business, the Hitler Government continued
to ride last week the great wave of its successful propaganda,
continued to rely more and more heavily on spry little, clubfooted.
Dr. Goebbels. Nazi fanatics for a "pure race" contend, in
the case of other Germans, that a club foot proves "bad blood,"
but Dr. Goebbels is
