Happy New Year?

Every member of President Paul von Hindenburg's household, from his bashful scrubwoman to his self-important State Secretary, sat down to lunch at one long table in the drawing room two days before Christmas. Beside pallid, big-jowled Old Paul sat his buxom, apple-cheeked typist. The flustered scrubwoman sat next to the President's handsome son, Lieut.-Colonel Oscar von Hindenburg, whose brunette wife, about to bear a daughter, had the hall porter on her right. A telephone girl sat with bespectacled State Secretary Dr. Otto Meissner who had very little to say. Across the table from Old Paul his well-brought-up grandchildren gravely discussed engines with the President's chauffeur. Everyone was given a pre-Christmas present. All the servants were told they could have the whole day Christmas off. Toward the end of the lunch President von Hindenburg dozed, woke up with a jerk.

Jail Delivery. Under the widest amnesty granted in Germany since the Revolution of 1918, more than 10,000 political jailbirds -- mostly Communists and Fascists--were let out of the Fatherland's jails on Christmas Eve or earlier in the week. This liberal gesture, designed to win popularity for the Cabinet of essentially unpopular and aristocratic General Kurt von Schleicher, was completed in able Santa-Claus fashion by giving each jailbird enough money to pay his carfare home and buy a Christmas dinner. Prisoners arrested in summer were given a winter overcoat, mittens.

$642,600,000, Where he will find so much money remained somewhat of a mystery, but last week Chancellor von Schleicher announced that in 1933 his new Ministry for Re-employment will spend two billion, seven hundred million marks ($642,600,000) to make work for Germany's unemployed who now stand at the staggering total of 5,600,000--or more than one-quarter of all workers in the Fatherland.

This Government project was announced to have the blessing of Dr. Hans Luther, president of the Reichsbank who has vetoed earlier make-work schemes on the ground that they would mean inflation. According to the Government's rather vague announcement, "assistance will be rendered only to undertakings for the common weal" by means of 20-year loans at 6% to municipalities, small businessmen, guilds and employers of hand labor generally. Large contractors, firms using labor-saving machinery and producers of luxuries will get no make-work loans.

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