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4) The State Cabinets are responsible to the Hitlerite Government alone, and may not be removed by State Legislatures.
This decree not only tied all power to Berlin but it cut short the hope of Bavarian and Saxon royalists to re-establish their own dynasties by electing the Princes statthalters.
Business. "Coordination" was the word most frequently on Nazi tongues last week. Having "coordinated" the civil service, government, education and the arts, the Hitler Government next turned to German industry. For the past 14 years the most influential organization in Germany has been the Federation of German Industries, which in its time has made and upset Chancellors and governments. Last week the entire directorate resigned to be replaced by Nazi sympathizers. President of the North German Lloyd, 73-year-old Philip Heineken, resigned too. The cinema industry, from which Nazi leaders expect a great deal in the way of propaganda, shut down completely while government leaders prepared rules to forbid Jewish actors, executives, salesmen.
Religion. Over the Alps to Italy went Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen last week. He had just lost a month-long backstage battle for the last important German post not controlled by Nazis, the Premiership of Prussia. Adolf Hitler, making himself statthalter for Prussia, was about to confer the Premiership on his most active assistant, Capt. Hermann Goring, and that same Capt. Goring was about to set out for Italy to join Col. von Papen, whose job there was twofold: 1) to prepare the way for a later visit to Italy from Handsome Adolf himself; 2) as a good Catholic and Cameriere Segreto di Spada e Cappa (Private Chamberlain, Cape & Sword) to the Papal Court, to persuade the Vatican that Hitlerism promised no harm to Christianity or to the Catholic Church. What was happening behind him was no help. Having "coordinated" almost everything in sight, the enthusiastic Nazis turned next to the Evangelical Church.
A mass meeting of "German Christians" was called in the old Prussian Diet House to hear the outline of the new Nazi religion. A Pastor Hossenfelder led off with an announcement:
". . . Luther said a plowman can be more pious at his plowing than a nun at her prayers. We say a Storm Trooper in his fighting is more in God's will than a Church that does not jubilantly join in the call for the Third Reich."
A Dr. Wieneke-Soldin added:
"The Swastika cross and the Christian cross belong together. ... If Christ were to rise again today he would be the leader in our struggle against Marxism and internationalism."
Most startling ideas of the new religion were: the Old Testament, being a Hebrew Book, is to be forbidden in German Sunday Schools. German Christians will substitute for it 100% German mythology—Wotan for Moses, Siegfried for Saul. Saints of the new religion will be such War heroes as that potent air fighter, the late Captain Baron Manfred von Richthofen.
Enlarging on this theme, Alfred Rosenberg, chief of the Nazi Foreign Politics