Sore Saar

The languid gentlemen in Geneva who keep the League of Nations bumbling along received a shocker last week which made it seem that the League Council, when it meets next month, may have to create the first League army of hired mercenaries.

The shocker came from the League's own President of the Governing Commission of the Saar, His Excellency Geoffrey George Knox, a swank British career diplomat with the manners of a Curzon and something of the late Marquess' talent for playing the Viceroy. Many a Saar citizen calls the League's Governing Commission the Negerregierung or "Government for Negroes," implying that Mr. Knox treats 100% Nordic, German-speaking Saar folk as if they were, to say the least, his social inferiors. Next January the League Commission must hold a plebiscite to decide whether the Saar shall be reunited with Germany or turned over to France. For months Nazi agents from the Fatherland have been so active in the Saar that Frenchmen charge they have set up a "rival Government" at Saarbruecken.

Last week viceregal Mr. Knox informed the League that the Saar is "beyond control" by any means at his disposal. He is able to maintain only nominal control, he hinted, because of his right to call in French troops and the fear of Germany that he may do so. If the plebiscite is to be held on schedule, declared President Knox, the League must act on his repeated request to be supplied with at least 2,000 armed men to put the Saar under virtual martial law while the vote is taken.

To back up this demand for action, the Saar Commission sent to Geneva a report stating that Saar police can no longer be relied on and are now hand in glove with the Secret Police of Adolf Hitler across the border. Up to a few months ago Saar Catholics, offended by Nazi attempts to bring their church to heel in Germany, were expected to influence the plebiscite strongly, but by last week the poll seemed so likely to favor Germany that a frantic rush had begun by Saar citizens to climb on the Nazi bandwagon.

The sole Saar member of the League Commission submitted a minority report, declared that 2,000 or even more mercenaries from abroad could not keep order during the plebiscite. In the Saar Landesrat, a parliament without powers, deputies of the so-called German Front rose in a body last week and marched out as a direct affront to President Knox. They accused him of permitting French papers in the Saar "to defame and vilify the late President von Hindenburg." Not without foundation, this charge referred to an item in the SaarbrUecken Volksstimme which closed its report of the Feldmarschall's burial thus: "We will now dismiss von Hindenburg as a representative of soulless barbarism and of the Germany that turned its back upon civilization."

Next day Chancellor Adolf Hitler, striving to win his own plebiscite at home (see p. 16), ordered the German Foreign Office to notify President Knox that "The German Government strongly protests against the [League] Commission's attitude . . . in the Saar Territory which is German and whose inhabitants are German."

In Berlin tireless Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda & Public Enlightenment, found time to order the German Post Office to print an issue of propaganda stamps urging return of the Saar to Germany and put them on sale forthwith. To give the League Council pause when it meets next month, Dr. Goebbels announced fantastic plans to cover "25 square miles" with a stupendous mass meeting of Germans and Saar citizens whom he planned to bring in innumerable special trains to Coblenz.

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