Radical Reactionaries

(See front cover)

Savage riots in the Fatherland's leading cities landed nearly 1,000 Germans in jail last week, cost eleven lives. Fascists and Communists battled each other and the police, facing Germany's new "Cabinet of Monocles" with grave problems of public order.

Latins, not Teutons, are supposed to stab each other but there was knife work aplenty in German streets last week. Stabbed, a Hamburg policeman died after two nights of agony. Stabbed in the heart at Essen, a young Fascist died on the spot Meanwhile in Cologne police beat off Fascists who bludgeoned them with iron rods. A Communist was shot dead at Strassfurt, a Fascist at Dortmund, another Communist at Duisburg. Street clashes grew so hot at Kiel that German sailors kept prudently in barracks, cancelled their announced "Parade in Celebration of the 13th Anniversary of the Scuttling of the German Fleet at Scapa Flow." Policemen walked their beats in pairs.

Riots were biggest and worst in Greater Berlin, most extensive city on the European Continent (area 348 sq. mi.). While unconcerned tourists strolled Unter den Linden, the northwest suburbs of Berlin became a welter of knifing, bludgeoning and wild shots. Communists, defending their homes, ripped up paving stones, barricaded streets, stuffed their barricades with mattresses. The leader of a Fascist charge was shot dead as he went over the Red top. Police, clubbing furiously, no sooner restored order in one street than rioting broke out in the next.

"If the police won't support us, we'll boot them to Hell!" screamed Herr Edmund Heines, a Fascist member of the German Reichstag speaking at Breslau. "In one month we'll be the police! '

Somebody aboard a speeding railway train near Dusseldorf fired random shots at pedestrians, hit none. Gerresheim police picked up a dead bicyclist, said he had been killed "apparently by shots fired aimlessly by passengers on a tram.

Finally a pistol battle took place in the publishing plant of Berlin's world-famed Socialist daily Vorwdrts ( Forward!"). Shooting from behind their presses, Socialist pressmen repulsed invading Fascists who, however, severely-wounded two pressmen. Later a sniper concealed in the Vorwarts building pointed a shotgun at Fascists marching past in the street, squeezed the trigger, badly wounded one Fascist.

Reaction Rampant. The blazing riots sprang, many Germans thought, from smoldering popular resentment at decrees and orders daily rushed into effect by Germany's new Cabinet, many of them over the signature of President von Hindenburg.

Though Chancellor Lieut.-Colonel Franz von Papen was in Switzerland attending the Lausanne Conference last week, he received incessant telephone calls from Berlin, kept in closest touch. On soft-spoken but reactionary Chancellor von Papen, the German masses blamed decrees and orders which:

1) Restored the Wartime nuisance tax of 12 pfennigs (2 1/2-c-) on each kilogram (2.2 Ib.) of salt.

2) Imposed on all employed Germans an income tax from1 1/2% to 6 1/2% "for the benefit of the unemployed."

3) Reduced by 23% the national unemployment dole.

4) Reduced by 30,000,000 marks per year the total sum budgeted for invalids' and orphans' pensions.

) Extended Germany's retail sales tax to all merchants. Those with an annual turnover less than 5,000 marks ($1,191) have been exempt.

6) Placed German broadcasting stations at the Government's disposal every night from 6:30 p. m. to 7:30 p. m.

7) Empowered Minister of Interior Baron von Gayl to suppress at his discretion any German newspaper.

"Hammer Blows!" Smoldering behind national discontent with the von Papen-von Hindenburg decrees was of course the issue of states' rights which flamed up when Premier Dr. Heinrich Held of Bavaria defied President von Hindenburg's decree authorizing Adolf Hitler's 400,000 "Storm Troops" to put on their brown uniforms again and make public appearance (TIME, June 20). Last week Herr Hitler stormed into the presence of Baron von Gayl, demanded that Dr. Held be restrained from interfering with Fascists in Bavaria. Experts on the German Constitution meanwhile opined that no German state has the right to override President von Hindenburg's decree concerning what uniforms may be worn but that every German state may decide for itself what demonstrations are permissible on its territory.

Baron von Gayl, impaled on the horns of this constitutional dilemma, soothed Herr Hitler as best he could, then called a meeting of his Ministry of Interior of all the Ministers of Interior of all the German states. "I cannot implore you too strongly," cried Baron von Gayl, "to bring the regulations of your states as soon as possible into harmony with our federal policy on this most important, most vital matter!"

When the Ministers of Interior trooped home without committing themselves, Fascist fury began to show itself openly for the first time against Chancellor von Papen and his "Cabinet of Monocles," hitherto tolerated as better than the BrUening Cabinet (TIME, June 13). "This Government," exploded Der Angriff, Berlin organ of Herr Hitler, "has nothing to do with the Fascist Party! It has out-BrUeninged BrUening in issuing oppressive decrees. These last are hammer blows on the backs of a starving people!"

"No sense" but. . . . Chancellor von Papen, recently suspected of an intent to place the Free State of Prussia under the rule of a "Federal Commissioner" (TIME, June 20) agreed over the telephone to a peculiar settlement of that issue last week. The Fascists, though they have a plurality in the Prussian Diet and are therefore entitled by tradition to expect that the other parties will join in electing a Fascist Premier of Prussia, agreed last week that Socialist Dr. Otto Braun may remain Prussian Premier without opposition until the Federal election June 31.

In return the Socialists, who as the second largest party have a traditional right to fill the post of first Vice President of the Diet, agreed last week to the pop ping into that post of a Nationalist. Herr Wolfgang von Kries, tolerably acceptable to the Fascists. In logic there was "no sense" to this arrangement, but as a practical compromise it cleared the Prussian air. Herr Hitler seemed to assume that on July 31 his Fascists will score such a smashing victory nationally that opposition in the Prussian Diet will have to give way, thus ushering in a Fascist Premier of Prussia which is nearly two-thirds of Germany.

Trust Gulped. Reactionary though he is, Lieut. -Colonel von Papen sanctioned last week the highly radical step of absorbing the German coal, iron & steel trust V. S. (Vcreinigte Stahlwerke A. G.) into the Government at one fell gulp.

Not confiscation but purchase was, naturally, the method. The Government rushed to buy because Chancellor von Papen and his colleagues feared that unless they acted promptly V. S. would be bought for a song by the French munitions interests controlled by secretive, powerful Eugene Schneider.

Control of V. S. rested last week with famed German Industrialist Dr. Friedrich Flick. Recently he has virtually mortgaged the control to certain Dutch banks. Last week Patriot Flick sold his remaining interest to the Fatherland for "much less" than the French have been offering, received a mere 100 million marks ($23,820,000). The Dutch end of the deal was quietly arranged. For good or evil, Chancellor von Papen must go down in history as the man who while absent in Switzerland brought under German Government control last week more than two-fifths of the Fatherland's production of pig iron and rolled steel and nearly one-sixth of its coal and iron ore mining industry.

Von Papen. Born in 1879 at Werl in Prussia, Franz von Papen became a "career officer'' in the Imperial German Army. He married the niece of a French Marquis from the Sarr Basin (then German, now governed by a League of Nations commission). From his wife the Prussian officer learned to speak almost perfect French. In Washington, where von Papen was German Military Attache when the War opened, both she and he were popular. But was he a spy?

Certainly President Wilson demanded his recall, certainly the French accused him of "spying'' in the Netherlands in 1916. But the formal U. S. indictment charging Franz von Papen with fomenting sabotage and attempts to blow up Canada's Welland Canal was quashed early this year, along with a batch of other Wartime indictments. Evidence against von Papen was supplied chiefly by British operatives, perhaps not above crediting falsehoods against a German in time of war. What most aroused U. S. public opinion at the time was the revelation that Franz von Papen once wrote a private letter in which he used the phrase "these imbecile Yankees."

Devoutly Catholic and with highly placed Catholic friends (even in France), Franz von Papen became to all appearances a rich, regular and unexciting member of the German Catholic Centre Party, the party led today by ex-Chancellor Heinrich BrUening. When President von Hindenburg dropped BrUening, who had been his protege, the German military camarilla which had maneuvered BrUening out suggested von Papen to the ancient President, who made him his new protege.

That von Papen is the creature of the camarilla headed by his Minister of Defense, Lieut.-General Kurt von Schleicher, few Germans doubted last week. They remembered however that Dr. BrUening, utterly obscure when first appointed, grew in the 26 months that he was Chancellor into a figure commanding vast respect and not a little liking throughout Europe. Camarilla or no camarilla, intrigue or no intrigue, the German Chancellor today is Lieut.-Colonel Franz von Papen. Through his bony fingers pass the affairs of a Great Power. In Switzerland last week he seemed to be finding himself, seemed to be learning, had he not learned before, how to tackle foreign affairs from the Teutonic point of view. Chatting one day about the Young Plan with Premier Edouard Herriot of France, he quietly observed : "None of the promises have come true." This said, shrewd Statesman von Papen did not find it hard to warn the French Premier that Germany was in no condition or mood to pay further Reparations (see p. 14).

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