Battlefield Investments

Able Berlin Correspondent Hubert Renfro Knickerbocker has worked long and hard for the slender New York Evening Post and for its slender Quaker brother, Philadelphia's Public Ledger. Last year he won the Pulitzer Prize for correspondence with his 10,000-mi. travel diary through Russia. Pleased, the Post last spring assigned him to survey Europe, sensationalized his findings in a series of articles called Fighting the Red Trade Menace. Earlier this winter Correspondent Knickerbocker was again on the move, this time touring Germany in company with James Abbe, a onetime society photographer. Their discoveries, meaty copy for the Post & Ledger, appeared in 24 daily installments which were concluded last week. Title: BEHIND THE GERMAN SMOKE SCREEN.

Prefaced the Post: The United States, with a $4,000,000,000 stake in Germany, wants to know if the Reich, standing between Hitlerism and Communism, threatened with civil war, can or will pay her obligations.

Investigator Knickerbocker found 15,000,000 Germans on the dole, wrote touchingly of abject poverty in the Red quarter of Berlin in striking contrast to gay night life around the Kurfursten Damm. In the town of Falkenstein, Saxony, he found half the population on the dole; in Thuringian villages the spectre of starvation. In Essen there was the ever-present fear of a new French invasion of the Ruhr, overshadowing the threat of Communism. Every-where Hitler's power was rising. Nearly three-fourths of Heidelberg's students were Nazis. Germans, facing ruin, were almost unanimous in demanding Reparations cancellation at any cost. The U. S., Correspondent Knickerbocker found, has too great a stake in the Reich to be able to afford isolation. Interviews with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis' Presidential candidate, General Franz von Epp, brought forth an ultimatum to the U. S.: If France prepares to invade Germany, the U. S. will be expected to stop her; otherwise Germany will pay no private debts. Knickerbocker conclusions:

P: "Germany can pay no reparations now. She could pay in a healthier economic world, but she will not, for Germany from now on will fulfill no part of the Versailles Treaty that she is not forced to fulfill, and the chances of forcing payment of reparations are less today than ever. P: "Germany can and will pay her private debts provided the French do not use force against her. But Germany is determined to re-arm if France does not disarm. P: "The German people as a whole have disavowed and repudiated the Versailles Treaty. France considers it her only guarantee of life. French and German differences have grown worse and they give every evidence of growing still worse in the future. Whether the development comes to war within predictable time or not, warlike years lie ahead for Europe. P: "American investments on this continent are investments in a battlefield."

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