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Dr. Schmitt is well known to favor devaluation of the German mark by 20%. The staggering powers slipped into his hands last week resemble those granted by the U. S. Congress to Franklin Roosevelt, some of which the President has of course not used. Tight-lipped Tsar Schmitt gave no sign of how he may use his powers, but Adolf Hitler was seen to have created a nearly perfect engine of economic despotism. Thus far in economics he has been largely windbag. From now on German Big Industry—the Thyssens, Krupps, Siemenses and their ilk—are in a position to receive from Adolf Hitler vastly more than they ever dreamed of getting when they backed his Nazi Party with their millions. They know best how to profit from inflation, controlled or uncontrolled, and about such mysteries of exalted finance Old Paul von Hindenburg knows conveniently next to nothing.
Month of Truce. Under the fateful Enabling Act (TIME, April 3. 1933) signed by Paul von Hindenburg after he made Adolf Hitler his Chancellor, the President's signature is no longer needed to validate even such Cabinet acts as that which last week created the Economic Tsar.
Old Paul is potent now chiefly because the name of HINDENBURG is still so great that Chancellor Hitler is glad to buy this talisman by humoring the President's simple wants. He was more than prepared to bow to the Reichspräsident's will and keep on in office Old Paul's "best comrade" and favorite among all his bygone Chancellors, Lieut.-Colonel Franz von Papen, a brother officer in the Feldmarschall's old regiment.
Looking back nine years to Old Paul's first campaign for election as President in 1925, observers remembered last week how the proletariat jeered Der Feldmarschall, how Germany was plastered and peppered with such savage attacks as: Vote for the Mass-Murderer?
Vote for the Kaiser's Henchman? Vote for the Profiteer's Friend? Vote for the Hangman of Democracy? If you would elect all four VOTE FOR HINDENBURG!!
Today Adolf Hitler, except that he is no Kaiser's henchman, has fulfilled most of the sardonic 1925 reasons for voting—or not voting—for Hindenburg. The President votes for Hitler—that is, last week he endorsed the blood bath in a personal telegram to his Chancellor and last week his knobby old fingers steadied but scarcely guided the helm.
"Ordnung muss sein! We must have order!" But who is to bring order out of Germany's political and economic chaos? Last week Adolf Hitler, seven days after he had sent some of his closest political henchmen to Death and two days after he had made an Economic Tsar, suddenly left Berlin by plane for the Bavarian Alps "to draw from Nature further inspiration." In Berlin his party henchmen declared blankly, "July will be a month of truce. Also no more Cabinet meetings are scheduled for July." An inspiration. widely published by the official Press, exhorted all unmarried men and women under 25 now working in Berlin to "Give up your jobs to married people! Leave the comforts of office and factory! Go to work on farms where you can breathe fresher and freer air!'' "