Second Revolution?

The old man had left Berlin two weeks ago, supposedly to doze out the summer at his big manor house in East Prussia, but suddenly last week German statesmen were startled to feel again the enormous weight in high politics of HINDENBURG.

Like Santa Claus the venerable Reichspraedsident never comes down the chimney in person, but like Santa Claus he has plenty of devoted henchmen to make his purposeful deliveries. If Adolf Hitler came home with a swelled head and hot new ideas for Dictatorship from his visit to Benito Mussolini (TIME, June 25). certainly last week he was dextrously chilled and shrunk--and by the very Hindenburg henchman who first presented him to the President, dapper, nonchalant Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen.

The chilling and shrinking were endowed with Hindenburg might when the President telegraphed "congratulations to my Vice-Chancellor and best comrade" after Lieut.-Colonel von Papen had dared to read to college students at Marburg the first candid and sweeping criticism of Nazi policies voiced by any German statesman since Hitler came to power.

Raking the brownshirts' vaunted "Totalitarian State" from stem to stern, von Papen flayed its muzzling of the Press, its meddling with religion, its encouragement of fanaticism and the drift toward radicalism of those Nazis who keep shouting for a Second Revolution. "Did we experience an anti-Marxist revolution," he barked, "only to carry out the program of Marxism?"

Finally von Papen appealed covertly for restoration of the Monarchy in words' plain to every German: "In my opinion the German state will at some future date find its crowning glory in a Chief of State who is removed once and for all from the political arena, from demagogy and from clashes among economic and vocational interests!"

After this challenge Chancellor Hitler, were he a real Dictator, would have been obliged to squelch Vice-Chancellor von Papen. Instead he presided over secret Cabinet negotiations in which von Papen, cool and supercilious, let his speech be attacked and defended by the Chancellor's hottest Left and Right fanatics, notably club-footed Minister of Propaganda & Public Enlightenment Dr. Paul Josef Goebbels and roaring, bull-necked General Hermann Wilhelm Goeing, Premier of Prussia.

Goebbels on his own responsibility had already killed von Papen's speech out of second editions of German papers which had managed to rush it into their first, and Roarer Goeing had as much as seconded von Papen in a speech admitting that enthusiasm for Naziism was some what on the wane. Amid this Cabinet broil Herr Hitler showed himself the Little Man. He begged everyone please to be friends and patched up a tea party in the Ministry of Propaganda at which Dr. Goebbels and Lieut.-Colonel von Papen sipped at each other with wolfish smiles while the world in general was defied to collect what Germany owes by Reichsbank President Dr. Hjalmar Schacht (see p. 17).

Same day Chancellor Hitler rushed nervously off to East Prussia to make what peace he could with President von Hindenburg. That the President was not entirely disinterested his personal enemies claimed. There is a certain Dr. Guenther Gereke who raised a huge campaign fund for Paul von Hindenburg's last reelection (TIME. April 18, 1932) and afterwards kept a large remainder of the fund under circumstances which suggested that it was being held in reserve as a personal political war chest for the President. To arrest and convict Dr. Gereke of malfeasance was one of the Nazis' first acts, but his case has been carried to a higher court in which Son Colonel Oscar von Hindenburg has twice testified as a witness for Dr. Gereke. Well posted observers suspected President von Hindenburg of putting pressure on Chancellor Hitler to hush up the Gereke affair and of sending up a von Papen trial balloon to test the solidity of the Nazi State.

As the crucial test last week von Papen offered his resignation to Herr Hitler who refused it with excited protestations. This evident shakiness in high Nazi places emboldened German army officers to start rumors that Defense Minister General Werner von Blomberg might attempt a monarchist coup. But with 2,000,000 Nazis enrolled as brownshirt troopers. many of them armed, few Germans believed that any Hindenburg henchman would thus risk civil war. It seemed enough for the present to give Adolf Hitler the scare of his career.

In Nazi eyes Dr. Goebbels loomed more than ever a possible successor to Herr Hitler as he rushed among the masses last week and drew cheers from large brownshirt gatherings in Berlin with attacks plainly meant for von Papen and his Hindenburg ilk. "My party comrades," cried Dr. Goebbels, "only the National Socialist party has the right to criticize. To all others I deny that right. If we had relied upon those suave cavaliers who see in National Socialism only a transitory phenomenon, Germany would have been lost. The importance of these persons should not be overestimated. If we stamp our feet, they will scurry to their holes like mice. We have the power and we will keep it. Our power is absolutely unlimited. Not even the Crown Prince can take it away from us, because the people are behind us. Reactionaries point backward; we point forward!"

Chancellor Hitler, returning to Berlin from his parley, with President von Hindenburg, banged his big desk for the benefit of a British correspondent and shouted: "At the risk of appearing to talk nonsense I tell you that the Nazi movement will go on for 1,000 years! . . . Don't forget how people laughed at me 15 years ago when I declared that one day I would govern Germany. They laugh now, just as foolishly, when I declare that I shall remain in power!"

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