"Danzig Is Danzig!"

Prancing up to the Free City of Danzig* last week, the whole gaudy galaxy of Adolf Hitler's be-uniformed henchmen-- Goring, Hess, Goebbels, Streicher, Biirckel ct al.--had the time of their strenuous lives. In three short years local Danzig Nazis have whipped up the quaint, long-slumbering Free City into a frenzied "Little Teutonia." Last week came the crux of a Danzig election deliberately forced by Nazis. They already had a working majority in the Danzig Diet but needed a two-thirds majority to scrap Danzig's democratic Constitution, crush rival parties and subjugate the Jews.

How topsy-turvy Danzig politics have become appeared when Dr. Hermann Rauschning, the Danziger who headed the local Hitler ticket two years ago and won a working majority, abruptly declared that his eyes have now been opened to the real designs of Nazidom upon the ancient Free City and last week appealed to Danzigers to vote anti-Nazi.

It was Dr. Rauschning who as "Premier" of Danzig healed the long feud with Poland in 1933, thus setting an example which led to the ten-year pact in which Realmleader Hitler agreed not to invade the Polish Corridor adjoining Danzig. Last week Danzig Nazi gangsters hounded and harried candidates of other parties so mercilessly that Danzig Socialists and members of Danzig Catholic Center Party had to hold their political rallies just outside the Free City on Polish soil. Irish Sean Lester, the resident High Commissioner of the League of Nations in Danzig, tried to uphold the right of free speech last week but was met with guffaws by new Danzig Nazi Premier Dr. Arthur Greiser.

"Unless you mend your ways, Mr. Lester," contemptuously chortled Dr. Greiser, "you may have to get out of Danzig, just as the League's meddling Commissioner in Saarbrucken had to get out of the Saar!"

"My Son Fought, Too!" Among Nazi election posters in Danzig were: "Back to Germany!"; "The Saar is free--now it's Danzig's turn!"; "This election serves the same purpose as the Saar Plebiscite!"; and "German is Danzig!"

Privately, prominent Danzig Nazis were ready to admit that the Polish Army would click into action if Adolf Hitler dared as much as even to reach for Danzig. They thought the Realmleader would not dare reach, just yet. However, the Nazi electioneering corps from Berlin last week surpassed all records in spouting at Danzig gems of German thought.

"Heil Goring!" roared 10,000 Danzigers as Germany's beefy, bull-necked "General of the Flyers" arrived in the brand new uniform he designed and created after adding that title to his collection of high offices (TIME, March 25).

"I only hope the French realize how much Germany would prefer the outstretched hand of friendship to the clenched fist!" cried General Goring, Premier of Prussia etc., etc. "Germany has no need to occupy Danzig by force, because natural laws impose themselves. . . . We are ready to cooperate for a world peace which respects Germany's honor and freedom. . . . Remember the Saar!"

In Goring's suite was the Saar's new Nazi governor, Josef Burckel. His gem to Danzig voters: "If the Marxists say Germany has brought in professional murderers, I say that German mothers ar happy that their sons are being taught to keep their mouths shut, and it is the pride of German fathers to say 'My son fought, too"

All the way from Nurnberg came Germany's No. 1 Jew-baiter Julius Streicher stopping last week in Berlin to lead ar anti-Semitic parade with brass bands down Unter den Linden. His gem: "After this election Danzig will know what to with your -- Jews! . . . The Leader, as we all know, promised the Poles not to touch the Corridor for ten years, and he will keep his word as usual, but the hour will still come!"

Youthful, grey-eyed Rudolph Hess, vice leader of the Nazi Party in Germany, was hailed in Danzig as speaking for the Realmleader. "Elsewhere parliaments are making efforts that are futile--they need an Adolf Hitler!" cried Herr Hess. "They have tried to master unemployment in the United States, but for practical results they cannot compare with us! . . . Germany was like an animal unprotected by game laws, but Adolf Hitler has taken away from other countries their appetite for attacking Germany.

"The German program is a program of faith in the mission of the entire German race ! Danzig is an outpost of Germanism. Do you want to co-ordinate yourself with home, with Germany?"

Honor Uber Alles! Glorying in Adolf Hitler's violation of the Treaty of Versailles to rearm, Nazi Hess cried some moments later, with head thrown back and eyes shining: "Nonobservance of a treaty is a breach of Honor, and Germany today puts its Honor above everything else!" *

To deliver Nazidom's final electioneering blow in Danzig last week came the master mob orator who at times surpasses even Adolf Hitler, Dr. Paul Josef Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda & Public Enlightenment. Goebbels' gems:

P: "Years of humiliation are now finished. Years in which Germany will arise to new power and greatness are ahead. We have broken the Treaty of Versailles, Ja! We have torn off our shackles on the principle that 'Whoever has the power gets the rights!'"

P: "We have had luck, but we have deserved it! We have helped ourselves, and so Heaven has helped us. ... We are more truly religious than those who make it appear that God is their partisan. . . . We have swept the Jews out of public life in Germany and cleansed the Fatherland of the stench of Marxist corruption!"

P: "As it was in the Saar so it will be in Danzig. . . . Scorn the carping of whoever says The Leader has embarked on catastrophic policies! . . .Whoever throws the dice for high stakes must risk something. As Nietzsche said 'One must have the courage to live dangerously!' "

"Full of Treason.' As Danzig's intensive course in Hitlerism closed this week Danzigers voted in record numbers. As returns came in Danzig officials, mostly Nazis, became highly excited, put through repeated long distance calls to Berlin, kept Danzig in the dark all night.

Official returns, as finally released, showed an increase in the total number of voters so phenomenal, compared to Danzig's last election, as to suggest ballot-box stuffing. Even so the Danzig Nazi Party failed to reach its Constitution-scrapping goal of 67% of the votes, polled 59-9%, a gain of slight importance over the 51% won two years ago.

This means that the 40.1% of Danzigers who voted non-Nazi this week can now appeal to the League Council when it meets this week demanding protection from Danzig's Nazi rowdies. Already drafted, this protest had been scoffed at by the Nazi orators from Berlin who roared that: "The League cannot consider protests from an insignificant minority!" Not insignificant was 40.1%. From London to Moscow this week European editors referred to "Hitler's heaviest moral setback since the Blood Purge." In Germany, after Danzig returns were known, no German of any prominence would comment. The official Press, obliged to rave at somebody, raved against Danzig's onetime Nazi Premier Dr. Rauschning who appealed last week for anti-Nazi votes. When Danzig Nazi gangsters threatened to beat up Dr. Rauschning and he stepped over the border into Poland the German Official News Agency reported "RATS DESERT A SINKING SHIP. Rauschning is no longer to be found in Danzig. He is just full of treason."

Unable to get Rauschning, the brownshirt gangsters beat up two Polish diplomats, smashed windows of the homes of the Portuguese and Lithuanian consuls for Gdynia, who live in Danzig, and perpetrated upon Danzigers 85 verified assaults.

"The Nazis say 'German is Danzig' and indeed we are mostly of German blood," said a prominent Catholic Danziger, "but Danzig is not Nazi. Danzig is Danzig!"

*Pronounced as though sneezing, "Dan-tzikhh!" *Not a nonsense word pattern, this sentence becomes clear when it is recalled that in many German minds today "Honor" is a synonym for either "German aggrandizement'' or "honor," whichever suits the context.

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