Honk, Honk, Honk

"Two nights ago I was in Berlin and the blackout there was one hundred percent, really pitch black," reported a neutral diplomat who last week arrived in Paris. "By comparison with Berlin, what the French call a 'blackout' has left Paris still La Ville Lumiere (the City of Light)."

To keep from bumping into each other on the sidewalks at night, Berliners, harried by police who pounce on anyone striking a match, last week were rattling canes on the pavements or imitating old-time auto horns with guttural cries of "Honk, honk, honk!"

To get up and go about Berlin at dawn was to find occasional patrols of Nazi police angrily scrubbing off walls anti-Nazi slogans or posters stuck on during the blackout by the still active underground movement. Presumably the Comintern in Moscow has the names and addresses of the thousands of Communists who, up to the Pact, were determinedly working to overthrow Naziism and betting on war as their best chance. Whether they had quit, or whether they had been turned in by their Moscow bosses, was not apparent. No large numbers of Communists were reported by correspondents to have been seen leaving concentration camps. Still comparatively safe was the active Social Democratic underground campaign, which prudently stopped cooperating with the Communists soon after Hitler came to power.

In super-stolid North Germany, people's nerves seemed to be standing the blackout strain of bumps and boredom fairly well. A. Hitler, an Austrian by birth who spent his youth in Vienna, cheered up the former Austrian capital by putting it back on a basis of bright lights and tuneful night life. The ban on dancing was lifted, Vienna cabarets sprang to life, the street lights were on and last week the Viennese, incorrigibly light-hearted and easygoing, even tore from their windowpanes the dark paper pasted on when the Fuehrer ordered blackouts.

> The system of rationing by food cards was working so cumbrously in German cities last week that standing in long queues before food shops became the rule. Special red cards, permitting the holder to go at once to the head of the queue, were issued by the Nazi Party Peoples Welfare Department to "pregnant women, the lame and mothers rich in children."

> In Berlin the six weeks' course at the Nazi Party School for Brides was cut to four weeks and any German recruit was permitted to marry without the usual lengthy investigation of his race and ancestry on simple presentation of his mobilization card. To keep open as many hospital beds as possible for wounded soldiers, German doctors were ordered to deliver pregnant women at home rather than in hospitals for the duration of the war, except desperate cases of obstetric complications.

>On the ersatz (substitute) front, teenage German girls were sent out to gather "herbs from which substitute tea can be made."

Among these "herbs," Nazi officials solemnly announced are pansies, wild briar and the leaves of strawberries and blackberries.

>The great majority of Germans have always washed themselves with laundry soap--toilet soap in the Reich can now be sold only for the use of babies and physicians--but last week even laundry soap was hard to get. Housewives were advised to soak potato peelings in water, use the resulting mess as soap. Discovery that cellulose, used in making explosives, can be produced from discarded potato tops was announced in Berlin last week, caused the price of potato tops, hitherto not marketed but thrown away, to rise in Germany to 54-c- per 100 Ibs.

> "Keep a rabbit in your garden," urged A. Hitler's mouthpiece Voelkischer Beobachter, "both for purposes of fertilization and as a food reserve."

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