"The poor are getting poorer," Fritz Thyssen, German steel tycoon, lamented last week in a caustic interview on Nazi Germany. He spoke to New York Times Correspondent Herbert L. Matthews at Locarno, Switzerland, whither he fled last November.
It was the first time that Herr Thyssen, the sorely disillusioned "angel" of National Socialism, had so publicly recorded his sympathy for the poor of any country. And as he continued the interview, it developed that his chief concern was not so much for what the Nazis are doing to the poor of Germany as it was for what they are doing to German men of property. That is plenty.
Like countless others, Herr Thyssen saw clearly enough a dangerous revolution in Soviet Russia (he financed the Nazis as a bulwark against Communism), but failed to detect a social upheaval in Germany. The latter should now be clear enough for him and everybody else. In his last speech, Adolf Hitler described the present war as a social conflict between predatory, hypocritical plutocracies and great, proletarian States like Germany. Last week the Nazi hierarchy was busily ding-donging the theorem that the Third Reich is fighting the classes for the masses, canceled Herr Thyssen's citizenship.
> Propaganda Minister Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels ordered Nazi newspapers to fire away full blast at "plutocracy." Result: the Nazi movement was described as a "revolt against capitalism." Great Britain was pictured as a nation in which the ruling class lived in luxury while the workers starved.
> Labor Front Leader Dr. Robert Ley began a speaking tour of German industrial areas to explain the "revolution" to the workers. Before he left Berlin he published in the Goebbels newsorgan Der Angriff words that could easily have originated in Moscow:
"Money rules the world, but National Socialism does not acknowledge the rule of money. . . . The Führer said, 'I am perhaps the only head of a State who does not even have a bank account.' The National Socialist State leadership has not only destroyed plutocracy in Germany and allotted to money its proper role in economy, it also has freed the workers from the exploiters' fetters. The National Socialist economic order has freed itself, not only from the fetters of money in our land, but—and that is decisive—from the fetters of international money rule."