Hitlerists to Enter German Government Next Week?

The German Federal Government will resign on Tuesday next, the well-informed Ullstein press reports to-day. Dr. Bruening, it proceeds, will, however, be immediately asked by the President of the Republic, Field-Marshal von Hindenburg, to form a new Government.

The report, which has caused a great deal of disquiet, is prompted by indications that the Social Democratic Party, finding itself unable to continue to collaborate in the Coalition Government, has decided to withdraw its representatives, and that Dr. Bruening, in reconstituting his Cabinet, will make a definite move to the Right, and will include representatives of the German Nationalist Party, and probably also of the Hitlerist Party.

The danger has been in the minds of the leaders of German Jewry for a long time, and the recent criticisms of the Bruening Government for extending latitude to the Hitlerist agitation were coupled with suggestions that the Government was adopting so mild an attitude because it did not consider it expedient to antagonise the powerful and growing Hitlerist movement, in view of the possibility that before long it might be necessary to obtain their support for a new Coalition Government.

As long ago as September 1930, after the anti-Jewish excesses which occurred in Berlin on the day of the opening of the new Reichstag, the Federation of Jewish ex-Soldiers in Germany asked in its official organ, the “Schild”, whether the Government failed to provide protection for its Jewish citizens because they only number 550,000, while the Hitlerist voters number 6½ million.

The “Manchester Guardian”, which suggested last week (quoted in the J.T.A. Bulletin of the 2nd. inst.) that “the industrialists, the triumph of the Nazis, the depreciation of the pound, the worsening of the economic crisis, and the increase in the budgetary deficit (despite all economies and all new taxes) were combining to drive the Bruening Government which in any case is Conservative by nature – far to the Right, and that Dr. Bruening is gradually being compelled to consider the alternative of governing with them or of suspending the Constitution, because he can no longer be sure of the support of the Socialists, who give him his majority in Parliament”, returns to the subject to-day, suggesting that when the Reichstag meets next week, the Bruening Government may be defeated owing to the attitude of the Social Democrats. If the Bruening Government is defeated, it says, it is difficult to see any alternative other than a coup d’etat, which would establish a Bruening dictatorship, or a Coalition Government, in which the Nazis would preponderate.