GERMANY: Monarchists Fools?

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If the House of Hohenzollern, as most Germans believe, backed Adolf Hitler with secret cash at the start of his skyrocket career, Investors Wilhelm II and ex-Crown Prince Wilhelm must have groaned last week to see their Nazi equity apparently wiped out.

"German Monarchists should stop playing the fool!" shouted Herr Arthur Görlitzer, Vice Chief for Greater Berlin of the Nazi Party, to a quaking roomful of civil servants whom he seemed to suspect of Monarchism. "Men who work for a restoration of the Monarchy we will treat as we do those who think they must conduct propaganda for Moscow. Indeed we now regard the Monarchists as more dangerous than the Communists! . . ."

Meanwhile Chancellor Hitler, a Catholic who seldom goes to Mass, borrowed boldly from the Holy See ideas for a new German Constitution which, he intimated, will insure the succession in Nazi leadership by means similar to those insuring that there shall always be a Pope. Rolling out the polysyllabic titles now being drafted by Nazis into the new Constitution, a spokesman for Herr Hitler said that he will be Der Reichsführer ("Leader of the Realm").

Der Reichsführer will appoint a Führerrat (Leader's Council) described as "similar to the college of cardinals." and this, when Der Reichsführer dies, will choose his successor. The German people, who will not vote on their new Reichsführer any more than Catholics vote on a new Pope, will be divided into two classes: citizens (völksangehörige} and subjects (reichsangehörige): Subjects will be protected by law but barred from State office and the professions.

Guessing that the pseudo-apostolic Reichsführer would relish an attack on a Hohenzollern, blatant Der Deutsche, organ of the Nazi Labor Front, flayed onetime Crown Prince Wilhelm for collecting fat fees from sportsmen who lease the shooting rights on his Silesian estates. Calling this a "scandal," Der Deutsche demanded that unemployed persons be settled on the estates as farmers, "thus creating thousands of jobs and millions in new values."