Party Dress

The streets of picturesque Stuttgart were jampacked last week with 60,000 foreign-resident Germans, many from the U. S., gathered for the fifth Congress of Germans Abroad. But the stolid citizens of the town were not interested in the milling anslaender. Instead they pushed their way into the konditorei shops, gorged themselves on fancy cakes, coffee with plumes of whipped cream floating on top. For months, since stanch-bellied Minister President Hermann Goring inaugurated the Four-Year Plan for Nazi self-sufficiency, the Germans have been deprived of their whipped cream. In Munich, Berlin, where critical tourists foregather, such delicacies have always been available, but at high prices to native Germans using controlled currency.

Last week, with an eye to the visiting foreign-Germans, Stuttgart wore her party dress as all Nazi departments cooperated to give the town an air of plenty. Juicy hams, butter, thick Wuerttemberg sausage spread themselves in butcher-shop windows. The rigid foreign exchange decrees of Reichsbanker Schacht were tossed aside to allow foreign toilet articles and cosmetics to be stocked by Stuttgart drugstores.

Baron Constantin von Neurath, Foreign Minister, only recently become a Nazi Party member, delivered the keynote speech of the expatriate Congress: "We have no thought of going contrary to the generally accepted rules regulating the rights of foreigners, but we will not tolerate that foreign governments should discriminate against Germans within their boundaries because of Nazi affiliations."

British-born Ernst Wilhelm Bohle, appointed by Fuehrer Hitler early this year to head the Foreign Office section dealing with Germans living abroad, branded as traitors all foreign-Germans "who while professing nationalist sympathies at the same time help the opponents of the Third Reich."

As some visiting Germans drove to the nearby Black Forest, others gazed at Stuttgart's modernistic buildings, Bishop Theophil Wuerm--one of the Lutheran signers of a declaration drafted last week against Nazi religious aims--delivered a fighting sermon to his usual Sunday congregation in the Wuerttemberg capital.

"You should seek out influential men throughout the Reich, plead the cause of the Church with them and ask them to bring about the unification of the ideals of the Church and the ideals of the State. Freedom of thought still exists and nothing can obstruct the aims of the State more than these attacks on Christianity."

Inviting imprisonment by a reckless shot at the Fuhrer the Bishop declared: "Great men can be spoiled by too much worship and adulation and made incompetent to fulfill the aims of statesmanship. No nation should seek to elevate a faithful son of the Fatherland to the throne of God."

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