GERMANY: Schacht Libeled

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A crowd of irate Germans brandishing 1,000 mark pre-War banknotes, surged into a Berlin courtroom last week, howled that Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, president of the German Reichsbank is a swindler.

While other Germans gibbered outside, Dr. Schacht quietly entered the court by a back door, appeared as the plaintiff in a suit for libel against one Herr Roll, president of the Reichsbank Creditors' Association. Dr. Schacht complained that Herr Roll had libelously defamed him in a public speech as "the hangman of German industry . . . no cheat but a swindler."

"You are a hangman and a swindler!" shouted the mob—composed exclusively of members of Herr Roll's association. "Pay us! Pay us, Schacht! We want 1,000 gold marks for every one of these!" They waved their now worthless pre-War 1,000 paper mark notes. Eventually police reserves arrived, quelled the disorder, made possible the continuance of Dr. Schacht's libel suit.

Presumably the courts will hold that the Doctor is no swindler be cause he supports the Dawes Plan—as the least of many possible evils—and has therefore contributed to the total devaluation of the pre-War paper mark and its replacement by the new gold mark.

Dr. Schacht, though accounted sage in German and Allied financial circles, has something of a penchant for starting ill considered libel suits. His most famous action of this sort was to bring suit for libel against a German music publisher who had attached jazz music to a callow poem indisputably written by Herr Schacht in his youth and sold by him at that time for a pittance to a German magazine from whom it was purchased by the music publisher.