Bracht & Bullets

"Shoot to kill!" was the staccato order to Berlin police last week to break a streetcar & bus strike which had given millions of Berliners healthy exercise for four days.

Just whom the police were to shoot & kill was not stated by blunt, beefy Dr. Franz Bracht, the grim Federal Commissioner for the State of Prussia who gave the orders. Just about the time Dr. Bracht boomed "Shoot to kill!" the Berlin Traffic Co. notified 1,000 of its 22,000 striking employes that they are definitely fired and will never get their jobs back. The 1,000 firings made it needless to fire shots. Cowed strikers came back to work. Since Berlin was carried by Communists in the national elections (TIME, Nov. 14) Dr. Bracht, onetime Mayor of Essen, doubtless felt that his super-drastic order had been justified. It is not his first.

German cartoons covering Dr. Bracht's efforts to force Prussian ladies to "decently cover" their backs reached the U. S. last week. "It is hereby decided." decreed Dr. Bracht, "that the dorsal opening in feminine costumes shall not be cut so low as to be excessive." At first Dr. Bracht was understood to mean that evening gowns could be cut only a trifle less than shoulder high. In desperation Berlin and other Prussian shopkeepers waited upon the style dictator, told him that almost their whole stock of women's evening gowns would be rendered worthless by his decree. These gowns, the merchants hotly protested, were "decent." Did Dr. Bracht want to see them on the backs of mannequins? ( Dr. Bracht saw that he must avoid making himself ridiculous. Declining the mannequin parade, he announced a "liberal'' interpretation of his decree. Gowns could be cut as low as "the middle of the waist." But where is that? In practice everyone knows. But Berlin cartoonists saw their chance, filled Berlin dailies with mock drawings of learned statisticians trying to graph "the middle of the waist." cartoons which French papers reprinted with glee.

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