yet occurred) or a decrease in employment—here they point to short time in the textile industries, which until recently have boomed.
ECONOMICS IS NOT HITLER’S STRONG POINT
Schacht’s position at the moment seems stronger than ever. It is a matter of personal vanity with him to maintain the nominal gold parity of the mark, and in this, his only serious difference with Big Industry, he is eagerly backed by the Fuehrer. Economics are not Hitler’s strong point, but his reaction to any suggestion of inflation is as hysterical as that of the class from which he comes, and he is determined to “shield his people from this menace.”
Perhaps the most perplexing thing about Nazi Germany is the public response to the whole business. It is interesting to find that the people who have been sent back to the land are just as eager as in the bad old days to be urban again at the first opportunity. Among young men one hears irritation over the East Prussian landowners who are profiting from the favors showered upon farmers, while they pay neither their debts nor their taxes and seem farther than ever from expropriation. Business people who are doing quite well seem skeptical.
ARMING IS ACHIEVEMENT OF THIRD REICH
On the whole National Socialism has become more pernicious because it has improved its technique. An example of this is the increasing hardship to which German Jews are subjected without the publicity which formerly did something to protect them. The English public is, at most, aware of the Frankfurt incident in the organized boycott of Jewish shops, which had been proceeding all through December, in many provincial towns, in preparation for the “purely German” festival of Christmas.
Though Jews are supposed to be allowed commercial, if no cultural, functions, one finds that a stock-broker has just been forbidden in the Bourse, or that to sell newspapers has become a cultural activity. The pressure has been increasing steadily since Hess’s strongly anti-Jewish order to the Nazi party issued in Munich on August 8th.
But what is done now is effectively and quietly done. So the anti-Semitic orientalism of the Third Reich may be said to have achieved nothing certain but the military efficiency of the Hohenzollern kings at the cost of the religious and racial tolerance for which they were famous.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
