150,000,000 Bid

Adolf Hitler's timing is seldom wrong, and just as the Czechoslovak crisis was coming to a showdown, German Economics Minister Dr. Walther Funk was dispatched from Berlin to the Balkans. Dr. Funk arrived last week in Ankara, the capital of a Turkey which only recently sent a delegation to Britain, sewed up a London loan for rearmament which was said to array President Kamal Atatuerk ("Father of the Turks") with the forces of Democracy.

Tactful Dr. Funk proclaimed at a Turkish banquet last week: "The principal desire of Germany is establishment of the closest possible cooperation among the nations--thus leading to their Welfare, Peace and Happiness." This was a different note indeed from Kaiser Wilhelm II's bluster about "Berlin to Bagdad" and the "Drang nach Osten" or German "pressure toward the East." Anxious to preserve the new amenities between Germany and Britain established at Munich, yet anxious, too, to cash in on Germany's freshly won kudos, Dr. Funk opened as quietly as possible a Turkish credit with Germany of 150,000,000 marks ($60,000,000) for the purchase of "industrial and military equipment and materials for public works and other purposes."

Ankara statesmen, however, did not appear to have slipped into the noose of Nazidom. Cynical neutrals figured that Turkey and the Balkan States are now delightedly inviting bids from the democracies and the totalitarian states, with not. even the azure skies of the Near East as the limit in a game of dishing out money which the richer democracies should be able to win.

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