(See front cover) The compass point of all Europe last week was a huge square brick and stucco manor house in East Prussia atop which perched pensively a knobby-kneed stork called "Oscar."
Old servants say that Oscar must be nearly as old as the President's son, spruce Lieut.-Colonel Oscar von Hindenburg. With his nameless mate Oscar spends his winters in Africa, as do most East Prussian storks, but summer finds him always back at Neudeck to bring not babies but good luck to the 86-year-old Reichspräsident. In backward, superstitious East Prussia nothing is so unlucky for a great landed Junker as to lose his stork. "Take care of Oscar" the President benignly commands when leaving Neudeck, and Oscar, so peasants think, takes care of Old Paul. Last week Oscar, dozing on the President's roof with one leg tucked under his wing, straightened up with a jerk and a squawk as a roaring Mercedes sped up the long white road and out jumped Adolf Hitler.
The crux of crisis since the Nazi blood bath had been reached (TIME, July 9). Either the pudgy, smudge-mustached Chancellor would kick out of his Cabinet such experienced non-Nazi statesmen as Vice Chancellor von Papen and Foreign Minister Baron von Neurath. after which he would go the whole Nazi hog alone, or else these "Balance Wheels" would be retained to steady his careening Government. In Berlin for some days von Papen had been considered politically dead. The strain of living under house arrest, never knowing when his guards might turn executioners, had made the Vice Chancellor's eyes red from sleepless worry—or nervous weeping. Even a son of onetime All Highest Kaiser Wilhelm, gape-jawed, goggle-eyed Prince August Wilhelm ("Auwi"), had been called on the carpet as a plot suspect by bull-necked Nazi General Hermann Wilhelm Göring. After grilling perspiring "Auwi," whom he scared half to death, General Göring kicked him out of the Nazi Party and out of the Storm Troops in which he had been a group commander with the stinging words: "Dummkopf! dunderhead! you are too stupid to be bad. Get out!"
By no means stupid, Col. von Papen begged his guards to take him down to the Chancellory. There the Vice Chancellor sent up his card, "I wish to see the Chancellor."
Adolf Hitler, who was sitting with Nazi members of the Cabinet around his modernistic Round Table with a hole in the middle, professed surprise and sent down a question, "Why does the Vice Chancellor not come up and take his seat?"
Instead red-eyed von Papen begged a word with Herr Hitler away from his Nazis. When this was granted he offered his resignation, protesting, "My service to the Fatherland is over!" As von Papen drove away, still guarded, official Berlin considered him an ex-Vice Chancellor and workmen began ripping down partitions in his offices. In moved the new Chief of Staff of the blood-purified Storm Troops, leather-lunged Viktor Lutze.