Reality

Puzzle which the U. S. State Department has been trying to solve for the last month has been: how to recognize Germany's annexation of Austria without appearing to approve it. Last week Secretary of State Cordell Hull solved his puzzle neatly in two simultaneous notes to the German Government. Note No. 1 recognized the annexation, stated that the U. S. "finds itself under the necessity as a practical measure" of closing its Vienna legation and appointing a consular staff in its place. Net result, since the U. S. ministry in Austria was vacant anyway, was that John C. Wiley will stay on as consul general. Excerpt from Note No. 2: "I have to notify the German Government that the . . . United States will look to it for the discharge of the relief indebtedness of . . . Austria to the . . . United States." Austria's debt to the U. S.--for post-war relief loans--currently stands at $26,005,480.

What Secretary Hull's notes amounted to was recognition of Hitler's coup by handing him a bill. German reaction was complacency that the coup had been recognized at all. Said the Berliner Tageblatt: "In collecting some statements of leading American personalities -- statements that were amazingly estranged from realities--we note with satisfaction that in the face of so elementary and at the same time so organic an event as Anschluss the sense of realities broke through in Washington as well."

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