"My Leader"

To his soldiers Napoleon was Mon Empereur. Last week Adolf Hitler, having seized the powers but not the title of President (TIME, Aug. 13), caused Defense Minister General Werner von Blomberg to issue a significant order of the day:

Soldiers !

The Leader and Chancellor [Adolf Hitler] commands that henceforth all soldiers shall address him as Mein Fuehrer ("My Leader").

Seemingly "My Leader" was supremely confident that on Sunday, Aug. 19, when the German people are summoned to vote Ja or Nein on his seizure of supreme power, they will vote overwhelmingly Ja. Leaving the plebiscite campaign to be conducted by Minister of Propaganda & Public Enlightenment Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, serene Adolf Hitler spent the week in his Bavarian mountain snuggery "where I go to breathe the fresh, pure air of Nature."

Resourceful Dr. Goebbels at once got out phonograph records of the speech in which President von Hindenburg asked Germans to vote Ja in the last plebiscite. when the issue was Adolf Hitler's break with the Disarmament Conference and the League of Nations (TIME, Nov. 20). From this record appropriate excerpts were transferred to a new disk for broadcasting, and all last week the dead Hindenburg campaigned for the live Hitler.

Speakers lined up by Dr. Goebbels to campaign for "My Leader" this week: Col. Oscar von Hindenburg; the Graf Zeppelin's Dr. Hugo Eckener; Wilhelm II's Nazi son Prince August ("Auwi") Wilhelm; German Olympic Games Heroes Hans Sievert (world's decathlon record holder) and Otto Peltzer (sprinter) ; Munitioneer Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach. For the first time newsorgans announced that Adolf Hitler will speak not to the German people but to "his people."

"Before God to Hitler!" In Germany devout Christians, heartened by their priests and pastors, have been called a bulwark against Nazi extremism. To win the votes of these good folk by unctuous conciliation last week was not the strategy of "My Leader." After more than a year of hesitant bickering, German Protestants suddenly felt the whip of Reichs bischof Ludwig Mueller, a square-headed, ruthless, onetime army chaplain picked by Catholic Hitler to be their Evangelical Shepherd.

Dr. Mueller summoned the Evangelical National Synod to meet in Berlin, keeping this summons out of the Press. The Synod is virtually hand-picked but some opposition flared. "Eight hundred pastors have already been suspended for opposing the present Church regime!'' cried Church Councilor Meisel, representing Bishop Wurm of Wuerttemberg. "Where is this to end?"

Riding the Synod roughshod, Reichs-bischof Mueller demanded that it abdicate its legislative powers, vesting them in his Church Cabinet and compelling all pastors to take, on pain of expulsion from their pastorates, this oath: "I swear before God, holy and omnipotent, that I will be true and obedient to the leader of the German people and the German State, Adolf Hitler, and that I will offer every sacrifice and service for the good of the German people. Furthermore that I will perform my duties as pastor in accord with the instructions issued by the German Evangelical Church and finally that I will serve my parish loyally."

After this oath had been read out a lay delegate from Stuttgart defied the Reichsbischof to his face:

"What right have you to expect us to have confidence in you? We have faith in Adolf Hitler because he has won it in 15 years of effort. You have nothing behind you but one year of failure. In this oath presented by your legal councilor you are hiding yourself behind Hitler and trying somehow to take refuge in his shadow."

In or out of "My Leader's" shadow, Reichsbischof Mueller jammed his entire program through the Synod by a vote of 42 to 12. The meek churchmen even abolished their Church flag: a purple cross on a white field. To correspondents the triumphant Reichsbischof cried: "We must now build for our Leader a really strong Church!"

On Sunday came a desperate outburst of pastors opposed to the spiritual dictatorship of Dr. Mueller. Their Council of Brothers, organized after he squashed their Pastors' Emergency League, circulated secretly a bold manifesto which such stalwarts as fashionable Berlin Pastor Dr. Martin Niemoeller read out from their pulpits to packed congregations. Denouncing the Reichsbischof's hand-picked Synod as "an assemblage organized in open violation of the Church constitution," the Council of Brothers manifestoed: "In all responsibility before God, we, therefore, declare to churches and their members: Obedience to this church regime means disobedience to God."

Sympathy for Mutineers. Only act of "My Leader" last week which might be considered vote-getting was to decree two amnesties, general and political, calculated to set free from jails and concentration camps some 100,000 Germans. Under the general amnesty, fines or prison sentences imposed up to the date of President von Hindenburg's death were cancelled: for first offenders where the fine was not more than 1,000 marks, the imprisonment not more than six months; for second offenders where the fine was not more than 500 marks, the imprisonment not more than three months.

Under the political amnesty "My Leader" pardoned: 1) insults to Adolf Hitler or the German Government; 2) offenses against "the wealthy or prosperous," provided the crime did not originate from "convictions hostile to the race or state";* 3) crimes committed from "excessive zeal" to further Nazi purposes. To ease the plight of Nazi innocents caught in the Roehm Mutiny and not yet "purged" by shooting, "My Leader" especially decreed last week that all imprisoned mutineers shall have their cases "sympathetically re-examined."

*A Nazi who had smashed a rich Jew's shop window would be pardoned, but the amnesty would not apply to a Jew or Communist.

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