Hitler, king of the golden river

GEORGE GERHARD

Like the theme song of a talking picture, gold courses through the political movements of Herr Adolf Hitler in a swift, unceasing stream. But too seldom is it the satisfying clink of hard-won specie. More often it is merely golden oratorical promise, impassioned and slanderous attacks against Levantine wealth, and ecstatic extolling of the golden locks which are the German birthright.

Gold is to Hitler what a meal ticket is to a breadline. The fascination that glitter holds for him may be seen in his revival of the former Imperial army's splendor. Before a nation impoverished and starving, Hitler parades his Fascist legions, with glistening helmets and muskets.

Behind the Fascist movement in Germany is not a politician but a political evangelist. He is a modern-day alchemist who weaves despair into golden threads of promise, who out of nothing has created a powerful army of 6,500,000 voters, lifting Fascism to a level where its representation in the German Reichstag has grown from a mere 12 to a formidable 107 delegates, making the party the second in power, influence and numerical strength among the fourteen political parties which constitute the German body.

Who is this man who reaches out with a powerful hand and shakes despair out of the people's souls, replacing it with political bedlam and economic confusion concealed by the wild, blind enthusiasm of youth? What magic does he wield, that only twelve years after, he should have his six and one-half millions of followers shouting for another war, rather than groaning any longer beneath the crushing burdens of the last one?

Adolf Hitler, the tub-thumper, and spellbinder, is a man of slender build, who looks as though he has had too much work but not enough potatoes. His tooth-brush moustache bristles as he talks and his jet-black hair, strangely in contrast to the tousled flaxen locks of the majority of his followers, is parted from brow to the nape of the neck and plastered down with pomade. Trained to his part by a German Shakesperian actor who attached himself to the Swastika banner hack in 1923, Hitler declaims the sentiments of his Nordics with fierce oratory and deepdyed conviction.

His birthplace was Austria; his father, a small-salaried customs official. He lost his parents in early childhood, and at the age of fifteen knocked at the rococo doors of Vienna to make a livelihood by the work of his hands.

But the atmosphere of his home had penetrated young Hitler to the very marrow of his bones. The pompous and reckless nationalism of a government official had been passed from father to son, and during his years of apprenticeship in Vienna (years full of privation when even the role of street sweeper was not too humble a one for him to play), he acquired a hardness and inflexibility of character which was to stand him in good stead in later years. Shortly before the war, he moved to Munich. At that time he already had very definitely fixed ideas about the world, a deep-seated glow of nationalistic conviction and an inextinguishable hatred of the Marxist doctrine.

Four years in the trenches deepened these convictions. Poisoned by gas in the last months of the war, the November revolution found him in a hospital, where he was regaining his lost eye-sight. If such a thing were possible, overthrow of the imperial government further emphasized his hatred of the Communists and further developed his belief that only out of solid nationalism can come salvation.

It was at this moment that Hitler had to decide either to co-operate with the Socialist government or to wage a bitter fight for restoration of Deutschland über alles, against a serious depression at home, against the trend of the times, against a whole world of enemies, against almost everybody and everything. He did not hesitate, hut took up the threads where he had left them back in 1913.

His important political career began in 1919, right after the Armistice, when he joined a club consisting of six men in Munich known by the stilted name "German Working Party." Aside from a few nebulous ideas, this organization lacked everything, including members. The first public "mass meeting" ended in a farce, with none but the seven founders attending. But only a short time passed, and Hitler's genius began to unfold. The "Party" was reorganized and reconstituted, and Hitler named director of propaganda. The "drummer of the national revolution" was provided with the bass-drum he had wanted so long.

A few meetings and the attendance reached the hundreds. Then one night Hitler was allowed to speak, despite the fact that his oratorical gifts were gravely doubted by the executive committee. The effect was instantaneous and overwhelming. The meeting was thrown into a bedlam; the audience yelled itself hoarse. And most important of all, a few hundred marks were contributed by the enthusiastic listeners, enabling the "German Working Party" to lay some sort of a foundation for its future work.

Meeting followed on meeting; the hundred enthusiasts grew to thousands. The first mass demonstration took place early in 1921 in the arena of the circus Krone with a capacity audience of nearly 6,000. The following year the movement became an avalanche, ten mass meetings being held simultaneously in the largest halls and auditoriums of Munich on one occasion. In January, 1923, no less than 80.000 men and women, boys and girls, for Hitler's oratory attracts young and old alike, crowded onto the Koenigsplatz to listen to his "prophecies."

Hitler is a born revolutionist; a brilliant personality with a terrific driving force, who has raised himself out of the gutter, and who, although occasionally vacillating in time of emergency, has never wavered from the principles on which his movement was founded. His colorful personality probably took on its vivid hues in the days when, as a painter's apprentice, he tinted everything from birdhouses to apartments, and the strange mixture in his political program, which includes a dash of socialism, of nationalism, of bolshevism, antisemitism, militarism and anti-republicanism —to mention only its more salient points— is very likely traceable to the fact that he is a man without a country, an expatriate and a convicted traitor.

He lost his citizenship when he enlisted during the war in the German army and was denied German citizenship because he placed himself at the head of the Fascist movement. Revolution was his cradlesong, but it was only in 1923 that he became known to the world at large, when with the assistance of the once great General Erich von Ludendorff and with some 200,000 followers he launched a ridiculously unsuccessful revolutionary movement in the ratskeller of the Kapuziner Brewery in Munich.

Prison is the traditional reward for heroic, but fruitless, revolutionary attempts, and Hitler in 1923 went the way of many others. An extraordinarily magnanimous Bavarian government, however, lopped off four years from his five-year sentence for treason, and playing a game of cat and rat let him free, with the feeling that, given enough rope, he would soon hang himself.

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But the government was badly stung, for Hitler emerged to find economic distress increasing and the soil even more fertile for the spread of his revolutionary doctrines. Fascism grew in proportion to poverty and dissatisfaction, and the last election found his army swollen from an insignificant 200,000 to a decidedly formidable six and one-half millions.

Today Hitler is a man of forty-one. The traditional "Marshal's baton" he carried in his private's knapsack during the war he now swings with a powerful gesture over a blindly devoted army. He has yet to prove he has the organizing power of Mussolini, the statesmanship of Lenin or the idealism of Gandhi.

His greatest asset no doubt is his oratory. His voice is quiet and restrained; his speech is biting and ironical, and every sentence carries a sting. His outbursts against those he labels "enemies of Germany" are staggering; and his arguments are full of dynamite.

His fierce oratory, thrown into the hearts of German youth and peppered with promises that the men who "betrayed" Germany at Versailles will be tried by revolutionary tribunals and their heads sent "rolling in the sand," has had an irresistible appeal. No wonder, then, that the Fascist hosts distinguish themselves through an aggressiveness of spirit and a recklessness of endeavor copied from their leader's example. Catch-as-catch-can set-tos with the Communist brethren usually end in a free-for-all fight, while the Hitlerites break out in song:

No Jewish eye Shall, dare behold German maid With hair of gold.

With a miraculous grasp of the rise and swell of popular emotions, and unfailing insight. Hitler hits exactly upon the demand of the people, just as an enterprising manufacturer senses desire for a hitherto neglected commodity and cashes in upon it. "The war is over," say the cautious, conservative grey-heads. "Let us be patient. Let us pay our reparations and get back

our freedom as quickly as we can.

"What the hell?" reply the Fascists with the bluntness of youth. "Did we lose the lousy war? Did we sign that infernal Treaty of Versailles? Are we to suffer by your mistakes?"

To understand the growing tide of enthusiasm and support which Hitler is gaining throughout Germany, one need only look at the platform he has formulated. Among its chief plans are the following:

Cancellation of the Treaty of Versailles.

Stripping of the Jews of public rights.

Seizure of all war profits.

Profit-sharing in all large scale enterprises.

Dissolution of large department stores to be rented to small shopkeepers.

Ninety per cent of Germany's population earns less than $100 a month. Few have adequate housing space; marriages have to he deferred for lack of a love nest. Germany's unemployed number 4,000,000 and those who are at work are staggering under terrific tax burdens. Is it surprising that six and one-half millions have listened to Hitler's clarion call?

As the economic depression in Germany has cleared the path for the rise of Hitler and his brand of Fascism, a further aggravation of business and industrial conditions might easily result in his complete victory. By virtue of his political creed, free from political entanglements at home and abroad, be would be a reckless, independent dictator, perhaps without the genius of Mussolini but with little less vigor and personality. Thus far, he has shown himself a revolutionary leader surprisingly lacking in constructive aims and ideals. His demands are based on chimera, and his success on the mastery with which he plays that delicate instrument known as mass psychology. But just as Mussolini was comparatively unknown until his meteoric rise to the very top, a full regime under Hitler would be required to furnish an adequate opportunity for measuring the real worth of this glittering German.