EUROPE: 1,063 Weeks

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In the summer of 1929 in Germany there were 720,000 unemployed. That winter there were 2,000,000. Looming bigger in a new crisis was a 40-year-old World War corporal named Adolf Hitler. If he looked back on his last nine years, on the growth of his National Socialist Party, he could see gains more impressive to him than to Germany's rulers. Nine years before he had joined seven men in one of the innumerable visionary parties of desperation that post-War Germany produced. There were then seven and one-half marks in the party treasury. With his colleagues he had worked out a 25-point program, designed a flag and uniform, floated a newspaper, taken the party itself from its founders. Now it had 108,000 dues-paying members. Now it had twelve members in the Reichstag (out of a total of 490). It had 13 deputies in the Berlin City Council. It won more than eleven percent of the total vote in an election in Thuringia. It had become important enough to be courted by Hugenberg, leader of the powerful Nationalists.

For the first time since the War, history began to be measured in days. The Miiller Government, socialist and conciliatory, gave way to the Bruning Government. In the Reichstag election the Nazis gained 107 seats, 6,401,200 votes (out of a total of 35,000,000). Hitler was no longer a rival of von Papen, von Schleicher, Bruning, but of Hindenburg himself. The Bruning Government ruled by decree, the von Papen ministry lasted 170 days, was followed by the von Schleicher ministry that lasted 56. On January 30, 1933, Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.

Pre-War. Simultaneously U. S. citizens, previously preoccupied by three long years of Depression, were compelled to take a new interest in foreign news. Strange news it was at first, confused, murky, seething, a sequence of brutal events, of medieval vengeance wreaked with modern weapons, news of German book-burnings, of anti-Semitic outbreaks, of a bloody purge, news of statesmen who seemed only masters of vituperation and violence. What could be expected from a country whose leaders believed, in Propaganda Minister Goebbels' words, that their mission was "to unchain volcanic passions, to cause outbreaks of fury, to set masses of men on the march, to organize hate and suspicion with ice-cold calculation?"

Beneath the surface of the news, bigger forces were in motion. Hitler's Germany warned that the post-War world had ended. Its end was soon thundered by the renewed sound of big guns pounding in Japan's 1932 attack on Shanghai. Crises began to come so fast, were reported so fully, speculated about so constantly, that they became horrifyingly familiar: a crisis over the League censure of Japan for seizing Manchukuo, followed by crises over the brief civil war in Austria, the assassinations of Dollfuss and of King Alexander of Yugoslavia, over the invasion of Ethiopia, the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the civil war in Spain, the German seizure of Austria, the Russian-Japanese clash in the Far East, the menacing gestures of Hitler against Czecho-Slovakia—until at Munich the sequence of bluffs, threats, swift moves, force and the threat of force culminated in the panicky weeks of Europe's worst war scare in 20 years.