Victor of Tannenberg

To Germans it is a bitter, galling fact that Posen, the birthplace of President Paul von Hindenburg, is no longer German but lies in the wedge of Polish territory which was driven through Prussia to the Baltic by the Treaty of Versailles. With his own province thus a knife in the back of his fatherland, Old Paul von Hindenburg has begun to display marked sympathy, of late, for East Prussia-- that part of Germany which is divided from the rest by the Polish knife. Last week the Herr President showed the tempo of his feeling by arriving with ponderous unexpectedness at a joint meeting of the German and Prussian cabinets, called to decide whether the Reich would extend to East Prussia, this year, financial aid totaling 72,000,000 gold marks. . . . Experts had displayed to the joint cabinets statistics proving that East Prussia, handicapped by isolation, can; not prosper unless temporarily subsidized. The cabinets, impressed, but faced with a necessity to economize, hesitated. Came Hindenburg. . . . He spoke as the civilian President of the Republic, but those who listened saw in their mind's eye the great Commander-in-Chief who, in 1914, had flung back the Russian armies from that same East Prussia which he was trying now to save again. German decorum kept secret the nature of the plea made by Old Paul von Hindenburg, but German patriotism made refusal--to the victor of Tannenburg* --impossible. Soon the joint cabinets issued a communique not only approving the experts' plan for direct financial relief to East Prussia but recommending further aid in the form of reduced taxes on East Prussian farms and real estate, as well as lowering of the freight tariffs on the German State Railways in favor of East Prussian goods. ^

*The great battle of Aug. 26-31, 1914, in which Hindenburg, with an inferior force, virtually annihilated the Russian army of the Narew.