Riddle

As the British and the Russians again began barter talks last week, Europe was still waiting to learn the answer to the riddle of how much bartering Tovarish Stalin was prepared to do with Fuehrer Hitler. Commodity chiefly dealt in so far was talk:

> From Berlin it was announced that the Soviet Union would deliver to Germany, within the next two months, 1,000,000 tons of badly needed fodder. Skeptics, figuring out that this would mean a daily delivery of 16,666 tons, doubted that the Russian railroads could handle such volume, believed it would take at least a ship a day leaving Black Sea or Baltic ports to transport the fodder. >From Dairen, Manchukuo, came a report, later broadcast from Berlin, that the Russians had agreed to transport 1,000,000 tons of Manchukuoan soybeans over the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Germany within the next few months. Soybeans are used to produce margarine, and oil cake used as cattle fodder. Again it was questioned whether the Trans-Siberian, part of the way a one-track affair, could handle such traffic in such a short time.

> The Berlin radio estimated that Soviet-Nazi trade for the next year would reach $800,000,000, about twelve times what it was last year. In return for "thousands, even millions" of tons of cotton, oil, flax, wood, Germany would deliver to the Bolsheviks entire factories, chemicals, machinery.

> A Soviet trade delegation of 45 experts arrived in Berlin, headed by Commissar for Shipbuilding Ivan T. Tevosyan. They were entertained in state. At the Chancellery they drove past the huge bronze doors, were honored by a company of the Fuehrer's bodyguard standing at attention, entered the great Chancellery hall lined with servants dressed in silver braid, blue coats, red vests, black silk knee breeches. The Fuehrer received seven of the delegation. Their program in Germany was to include visits to the Limes Line, the Krupp works and the Zeppelin plant at Friedrichshafen, and a short ride on a German warship as the guest of Reich Commander in Chief of the Navy Admiral Eric Raeder.

Talk as the Germans and Russians might over expanding trade, up to this week no foreign correspondent in the Reich could report that he had seen the actual arrival of Russian goods in volume. Foreign diplomats wondered whether these big trade announcements were not calculated: 1) to scare the Allies; 2) to reassure the German people that this time a blockade would not be effective; 3) to persuade doubting Germans that the Russians were, after all, reliable allies. Anent this thesis, the New York Herald Tribune's peripatetic Joseph Barnes, who specializes in listening to streetcar conversations and talking over lively topics with hundreds of Germans in all walks of life, reported:

"Among German Army officers the problem of accepting the Bolsheviks as allies has been less difficult than it has either for veteran Nazis or for the shopkeeping and white-collar middle class of Germany. . . . Older officers of the Prussian vintage have favored a Russian alliance for 20 years and they are reported to be worried only over the price--in Poland, in the Baltic Sea and possibly in the Balkans--which Hitler has had to pay for it.

"There are some Germans who argue away the paradox of Germany's friendship with Russia by insisting that Stalin has thrown Communism overboard and has become a Nazi. One of them--himself a Nazi and a former Army officer--told this reporter with great assurance today that pogroms now were frequently taking place all over Russia, and refused to believe that Jews still were numbered among Stalin's closest advisers.

"The converse of this argument--that Nazis will become Communists--is apparently believed by no one in Berlin. Nazi leaders have insisted since the war began that its financing must not be allowed to change the basic structure of German economy. War profiteers play as large a part in common speech here now as 25 years ago.

"The Soviet pact has hit hardest the older Nazis and the lower middle class. Every street in Berlin is dotted with small stores which have been driven out of business by the rationing system. For years many of these small shopkeepers have paid high taxes without grumbling because they saw the Nazis as their champions against big business on one side and against the Bolsheviks on the other. Since the war began the Nazis have cemented their old alliance with the former, and signed a new alliance with the latter."

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