GERMANY Seven Years War?
The square-rigged, ruddy-cheeked, sea-trading folk of one of the quaintest old towns in Europe last week dropped their placid and peculiar tasks—such as adding tiny flakes of pure gold leaf to the sparkling, sweet liqueur they sell as Danziger Goldwasser—to come tumbling down the high stoops of their peak-gabled houses for a bucolic joy spree over Adolf Hitler.
The populace of Danzig seemed to figure that for them the Blitzkrieg or Lightning War was over, and they cavorted with the gaiety of Armistice crowds in 1918. The 407,000 Danzigers are 94% German, solidly Nazi and have been super-propagandized for years to believe that most of their troubles would vanish once the Free City was unshackled from League of Nations and Polish control, rejoined to the Reich. Trudging in last week with armfuls of wild flowers from the countryside, the people had carpeted with blossoms ten miles of road leading into Danzig from their gambling casino suburb Zoppot. Appropriately, A. Hitler, who had led all Europe to take the supreme gamble, war, had slept the night at Zoppot, after arriving from the crumbling Polish front.
Amid the brilliant sunshine which Germans call "Hitler weather"—they used to call it "Kaiser weather"—the Führer rumbled off to Danzig in a six-wheeled juggernaut staff car, followed by two Gestapo cars in which guards sat fingering new-style German repeater rifles. They did not shoot when the sidewalk lines of brown-shirted storm troops holding people back in Danzig were repeatedly broken as crowds surged forward cheering. One break was made by a brawny group of Red Cross nurses. Whooping with excitement, young Danzig students risked their lives in dashes right to the juggernaut's flanks. Wherever the stiff-armed, saluting Führer looked he saw swastika flags, bobbing placards, "We Welcome Our Liberator!" "We Thank Our Führer!" "To the Liberator of Danzig!" "Our Hearts Beat For Our c!"
"Peace Jitters." In far from bucolic Wall Street, meanwhile, war babies stocks sagged heavily as traders, apprehensive of peace proposals Orator Hitler might make at Danzig, did a little quick profit taking, then spun the dials of their radio sets to hear the Führer. "It was a market based on peace jitters," recorded Financial Editor C. Norman Stabler of the New York Herald Tribune. He figured that the day before, "the market lost 32% of the war upswing" because it was feared that A. Hitler might directly propose peace.
Orator Hitler spoke in the medieval Artushof (Guildhall), introduced by No. 1 Danzig Nazi Albert Forster. "We have only this one wish," Hitler told Danzig, "that the Almighty God, who has blessed our arms, will now perhaps give other peoples comprehension of how useless this war . . . will be ... and that He may perhaps cause reflection on the blessings of peace which they are sacrificing because a handful of fanatic warmongers . . . want to involve peoples in war."