Genius Hitler

Down Berlin's wide Unter den Linden last week paraded 8,522 men and 870 horses, the well-trained German troops goosestepping, the as yet untutored German Austrians passing by in an ordinary march. No novelty is a parade to the German capital, but this one, shorter than usual, had as its special point the 49th birthday of the Chief of National Defense of Greater Germany, Adolf Hitler.

Few military secrets are really kept secret in peacetime but none is likely to be revealed at a public parade witnessed by foreign military attaches and foreign correspondents. Displayed for the first time in public, however, were nine heavy tanks of new design, from 18 to 25 tons in weight, varying widely in traction and armament. Still lighter than the 50-ton tanks used by Russians and French in Leftist Spain, heavier than the Italian and German affairs of about ten tons used in Rightist Spain, these new experimental tanks were apparently designed to meet the military criticism that at present Germany's tanks are either too light to be good fighters or too heavy for great mobility.

With Greater Germany shouting "Heil!", Celebrator Hitler's followers strove hard to depict as a great soldier the former corporal of Kaiser Wilhelm II's army. In radio broadcasts throughout Germany, Fuehrer Hitler was being pictured as a military as well as a political genius. It fell to no army officer but to Dr. Otto Dietrich, Reich Press Chief, to reveal that Genius Hitler's technical knowledge of things military "astonishes even the experts." So exultant was the Hitler birthday celebration throughout the Reich that Dr. Wilhelm Frick, Minister of the Interior, was moved to summarize: "Adolf Hitler is Germany and Germany is Adolf Hitler."

The nonmilitary feature of the birthday was to be seen at the German Chancellery, into which flowed truckloads of gifts from ecstatic admirers. Der Fuehrer received tons of flowers, hundreds of cakes, a set of phonograph records of Anschluss speeches, a set of foreign translations of Mein Kampf, a lion cub, the 500,000th Daimler-Benz car, a portrait of the late General Erich Ludendorff and numerous cradles, baby carriages, and babies' clothes "from the provinces"--i. e., from provincial families still unaware that the man who so often appeals to German mothers for more and better children is a bachelor.

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