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Confident that nothing which could be used against him had been in his house, Vice Chancellor von Papen. no longer red-eyed, gradually recovered his aplomb until he was his old chipper self. Since the duties of a German Vice Chancellor are even more nominal than those of a U. S. Vice President, Herr von Papen was in no hurry to have a new building found for his Vice Chancellory. He urbanely left his old offices to Storm Troop Chief Viktor Lutze who kept peppering brownshirt Storm Troopers every few hours with new orders. They must not wear their uniforms during July, must not assemble, must not question or dispute the Government's massacre methods in wiping out "the mutiny of a few Storm Troop leaders, a mutiny in which the rank and file were not involved." As a final sop to the boys in brown, who have every reason to fear that Adolf Hitler is going to reduce their numbers by a "cleansing" such as that through which Josef Stalin periodically puts the Communist Party, they were told last week: "Adolf Hitler is faithful to the Storm Troops. He loves the Storm Troops."
Economic Tsar. Behind the Storm Troop mutiny of last fortnight lay deep-rooted discontent and some of it was economic. Germany faces, due to drought, what may be her poorest harvest in years. Potatoes had tripled in price. Meat was ominously cheap as cattle which now cost too much to feed were rashly slaughtered. Next winter, as Adolf Hitler and Paul von Hindenburg well know, the German people must go back to eating what they hate— substitute foods.
In an effort to conserve the Fatherland's dwindling store of foreign exchange—sure to be needed to buy vital food imports next winter—Reichsbank President Dr. Hjalmar Schacht recently decreed a sweeping moratorium (TIME. June 25). Last week British threats of retaliation broke the moratorium as far as British holders of Dawes and Young loan bonds are concerned (see p. 15). This breach in the Moratorium Front looked certain to widen before onslaughts at once launched by the U. S. and French Embassies in Berlin. There seemed to be only one answer for Germany: controlled inflation, bulwarked by government control of the Fatherland's whole economic life. While the Press kept up a fanfare about the King of Siam and printed countless Hindenburg-with-Hitler pictures, the Chancellor got in the most drastic economic undercover work of his regime.
The Chancellor by an abrupt decree widened the powers of Economics Minister Dr. Kurt Schmitt until he became an Economics Tsar. Old-school Economist Dr. Schmitt is secretive about whether he is yet a Nazi. He is famed for the quiet way in which for months he has shielded Jewish businessmen whenever possible and generally run the Ministry of Economics on sane, rational lines which made him hated by Captain Ernst Roehm and other "Nazi Bolsheviks" now safely massacred. Last week the Cabinet decreed, effective for the next three months: "The Minister of Economics is empowered to take all measures ... to improve German business or to prevent damage to the nation's economic structure. . . . The measures taken may be contrary to existing law. . . . The Minister of Economics may punish failure to obey his rulings with imprisonment or fines. There is no limit to the size of the fine."