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                                                                                January 2, 1939

Man of the Year:Adolf Hitler




     Greatest single news event of 1938 took place on September
29, when four statesmen met at the Fuhrerhaus, in Munich, to
redraw the map of Europe. The three visiting statesmen at that
historic conference were Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain of
Great Britain, Premier Edouard Daladier of France, and Dictator
Benito Mussolini of Italy. But by all odds the dominating figure
at Munich was the German host, Adolf Hitler.

     Fuhrer of the German people, Commander-in-Chief of the
German Army, Navy & Air Force, Chancellor of the Third Reich,
Herr Hitler reaped on that day at Munich the harvest of an
audacious, defiant, ruthless foreign policy he had pursued for
five and a half years. He had torn the Treaty of Versailles to
shreds. He had rearmed Germany to the teeth -- or as close to the
tooth as he was able. He had stolen Austria before the eyes of a
horrified and apparently impotent world.

     All these events were shocking to nations which had defeated
Germany on the battlefield only 20 years before, but nothing so
terrified the world as the ruthless, methodical, Nazi-directed
events which during late summer and early autumn threatened a
world war over Czechoslovakia. When without loss of blood he
reduced Czechoslovakia to a German puppet state, forced a drastic
revision of Europe's defensive alliances, and won a free hand for
himself in Eastern Europe by getting a "hands-off" promise from
powerful Britain (and later France), Adolf Hitler without doubt
became 1938's Man of the Year.

     Most other world figures of 1938 faded in importance as the
year drew to a close. Prime Minister Chamberlain's "peace with
honor" seemed more than ever to have achieved neither. An
increasing number of Britons ridiculed his appease-the-dictators
policy, believed that nothing save abject surrender could satisfy
the dictators' ambitions.

     Among many Frenchmen there rose a feeling that Premier
Daladier, by a few strokes of the pen at Munich, had turned
France into a second-rate power. Aping Mussolini in his gestures
and copying triumphant Hitler's shouting complex, the once
liberal Daladier at year's end was reduced to using parliamentary
tricks to keep his job.

     During 1938 Dictator Mussolini was only a decidedly junior
partner in the firm of Hitler & Mussolini, Inc. His noisy
agitation to get Corsica and Tunis from France was rated as a
weak bluff whose immediate objectives were no more than cheaper
tolls for Italian ships in the Suez Canal and control of the
Djibouti-Addis Ababa railroad.

     Gone from the international scene was Eduard Benes, for 20
years Europe's "Smartest Little Statesman." Last President of
free Czechoslovakia, he was now a sick exile from the country he
helped found. Pious Chinese Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, Man of
1937, was forced to retreat to a "New" West China, where he faced
the possibility of becoming only a respectable figurehead in an
enveloping Communist movement. If Francisco Franco had won the
Spanish Civil War after his great spring drive, he might well
have been Man-of-the-Year timber. But victory still eluded the
Generalissimo and war weariness and disaffection on the Rightist
side made his future precarious.

     On the American scene, 1938 was no one man's year. Certainly
it was not Franklin Roosevelt's; his Purge was beaten and his
party lost much of its bulge in the Congress. Secretary Hull will
remember Good Neighborly 1938 as the year he crowned his trade
treaty efforts with the British agreement, but history will not
specially identify Mr. Hull with 1938. At year's end in Lima, his
plan of Continental Solidarity for the two Americas had a few of
its teeth pulled.

     But the figure of Adolf Hitler strode over a cringing Europe
with all the swagger of a conqueror. Not the mere fact that the
Fuhrer brought 10,500,000 more people (7,000,000 Austrians,
3,500,000 Sudetens) under his absolute rule made him the Man of
1938. Japan during the same time added tens of millions of
Chinese to her empire. More significant was the fact Hitler
became in 1938 the greatest threatening force that the
democratic, freedom-loving world faces today.

     His shadow fell far beyond Germany's frontier. Small,
neighboring States (Denmark, Norway, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania,
The Balkans, Luxembourg, The Netherlands) feared to offend him.
In France Nazi pressure was in part responsible for some of the
post-Munich anti-democratic decrees. Fascism had intervened
openly in Spain, had fostered a revolt in Brazil, was covertly
aiding revolutionary movements in Rumania, Hungary, Poland,
Lithuania. In Finland a foreign minister had to resign under Nazi
pressure. Throughout eastern Europe after Munich the trend was
toward less freedom, more dictatorship. In the U.S. alone did
democracy feel itself strong enough at year's end to give Hitler
his come-uppance.

     The Fascintern, with Hitler in the driver's seat, with
Mussolini, Franco and the Japanese military cabal riding behind,
emerged in 1938 as an international, revolutionary movement. Rant
as he might against the machinations of international Communism
and international Jewry, or rave as he would that he was just a
Pan-German trying to get all the Germans back in one nation,
Fuhrer Hitler had himself become the world's No. 1 International
Revolutionist -- so much so that if the oft-predicted struggle
between Fascism and Communism now takes place it will be only
because two revolutionist dictators, Hitler and Stalin, are too
big to let each other live in the same world.

     But Fuhrer Hitler does not regard himself as a
revolutionary; he has become so only by force of circumstances.
Fascism has discovered that freedom -- of press, speech, assembly
-- is a potential danger to its own security. In Fascist
phraseology democracy is often coupled with Communism. The
Fascist battle against freedom is often carried forward under the
false slogan of "Down with Communism!" One of the chief German
complaints against democratic Czechoslovakia last summer was that
it was an "outpost of Communism."

     A generation ago western civilization had apparently
outgrown the major evils of barbarism except for war between
nations. The Russian Communist Revolution promoted the evil of
class war. Hitler topped it by another, race war. Fascism and
Communism both resurrected religious war. These multiple forms of
barbarism gave shape in 1938 to an issue over which men may
again, perhaps soon, shed blood: the issue of civilized liberty
v. barbaric authoritarianism.

     Lesser men of the year seemed small indeed beside the
Fuhrer. Undoubted Crook of the Year was the late Frank Donald
Coster (ne Musica), with Richard Whitney, now in Sing Sing
Prison, as runner-up. Sportsman of the Year was Tennist Donald
Budge, champion of the U.S., England, France, Australia. Aviator
of the Year was 33-year-old Howard Robard Hughes, diffident
millionaire, who flew a sober, precise, foolproof course 14,716
miles round the top of the world in three days, 19 hours, eight
minutes.

     Radio's Man of the Year was youthful Orson Welles who, in
his famous The War of the Worlds broadcast, scared fewer people
than Hitler, but more than had ever been frightened by radio
before, demonstrating that radio can be a tremendous force in
whipping up mass emotion. Playwright of the Year was Thornton
Wilder, previously a precious litterateur, whose first play on
Broadway, Our Town, was not only ingenious and moving, but a big
hit. To Gabriel Pascal, producer of Pygmalion, first full-length
picture based on the wordy dramas of George Bernard Shaw, went
the title of Cineman of the Year for having discovered a rich
mine of dramatic material when other famed producers had given up
all hope of ever tapping it. Men of the Year, outstanding in
comprehensive science were three medical researchers who
discovered that nicotinic acid was a cure for human pellagra:
Drs. Tom Douglas Spies of Cincinnati General Hospital, Marion
Arthur Blankenhorn of the University of Cincinnati, Clark Niel
Cooper of Waterloo, Iowa.

     In religion, the two outstanding figures of 1938 were in
sharp contrast save for their opposition to Adolf Hitler. One of
them, Pope Pius XI, 81, spoke with "bitter sadness" of Italy's
anti-Semitic laws, the harrying of Italian Catholic Action
groups, the reception Mussolini gave Hitler last May, declared
sadly: "We have offered our now old life for the peace and
prosperity of peoples. We offer it anew." By spending most of the
year in a concentration camp, Protestant Pastor Martin Niemoller
gave courageous witness to his faith.

     It was noteworthy that few of these other men of the year
would have been free to achieve their accomplishments in Nazi
Germany. The genius of free wills has been so stifled by the
oppression of dictatorship that Germany's output of poetry,
prose, music, philosophy,art has been meagre indeed.

     The man most responsible for this world tragedy is a moody,
brooding, unprepossessing, 49-year-old Austrian-born ascetic with
a Charlie Chaplin mustache. The son of an Austrian petty customs
official, Adolf Hitler was raised as a spoiled child by a doting
mother. Consistently failing to pass even the most elementary
studies, he grew up a half-educated young man, untrained for any
trade or profession, seemingly doomed to failure. Brilliant,
charming, cosmopolitan Vienna he learned to loathe for what he
called its Semitism; more to his liking was homogeneous Munich,
his real home after 1912. To this man of no trade and few
interests the Great War was a welcome event which gave him some
purpose in life. Hitler took part in 48 engagements, won the
German Iron Cross (first class), was wounded once and gassed
once, was in a hospital when the Armistice of November 11, 1918
was declared.

     His political career began in 1919 when he became Member No.
7 of the midget German Labor Party. Discovering his powers of
oratory, Hitler soon became the party's leader, changed its name
to the National Socialist German Labor Party, wrote is anti-
Semitic, anti-democratic, authoritarian program. The party's
first mass meeting took place in Munich in February 1920. The
leader intended to participate in a monarchist attempt to seize
power a month later; but for this abortive Putsch Fuhrer Hitler
arrived too late. An even less successful National Socialist
attempt -- the famed Munich Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 -- provided
the party with dead martyrs, landed Herr Hitler in jail. His
incarceration at Landsberg Fortress gave him time to write the
first volume of Mein Kampf, now a "must" on every German
bookshelf. (Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess helped write it.
Imprisonment also gave Hitler time to perfect his tactics. Even
before that time he got from his Communist opponents the idea of
gangster-like party storm troopers; after this the principle of
the small cell groups of devoted party workers.)

     Outlawed in many German districts, the National Socialist
Party nevertheless climbed steadily in membership. Time-honored
Tammany Hall methods of handing out many small favors were
combined with rowdy terrorism and lurid, patriotic propaganda.
The picture of a mystic, abstemious, charismatic Fuhrer was
assiduously cultivated.

     Not until 1929 did National Socialism win its first absolute
majority in a city election (at Coburg) and make its first
significant showing in a provincial election (in Thuringia). But
from 1928 on the party almost continually gained in electoral
strength. In the Reichstag elections of 1928 it polled 809,000
votes. Two years later 6,401,016 Germans voted for National
Socialist deputies while in 1932 the vote was 13,732,779. While
still short of a majority, the vote was nevertheless impressive
proof of the power of the man and his movement.

     The situation which gave rise to this demagogic, ignorant,
desperate movement was inherent in the German Republic's birth
and in the craving of large sections of the politically immature
German people for strong, masterful leadership. Democracy in
Germany was conceived in the womb of military defeat. It was the
Republic which put its signature (unwillingly) to the humiliating
Versailles Treaty, a brand of shame which it never lived down in
German minds.

     That the German people love uniforms, parades, military
formations, and submit easily to authority is no secret. Fuhrer
Hitler's own hero is Frederick the Great. That admiration stems
undoubtedly from Frederick's military prowess and autocratic rule
rather than from Frederick's love of French culture and his
hatred of Prussian boorishness. But unlike the polished
Frederick, Fuhrer Hitler, whose reading has always been very
limited, invites few great minds to visit him, nor would Fuhrer
Hitler agree with Frederick's contention that he was "tired of
ruling over slaves." (Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, also
complained of the submissiveness of German character.)

     In bad straits even in fair weather, the German Republic
collapsed under the weight of the 1929-34 depression in which
German unemployment soared to 7,000,000 above a nationwide wind
drift of bankruptcies and failures. Called to power as Chancellor
of the Third Reich on January 30, 1933 by aged, senile President
Paul von Hindenburg, Chancellor Hitler began to turn the Reich
inside out. Unemployment was solved by: 1) a far-reaching program
of public works; 2) an intense re-armament program, including a
huge standing army; 3) enforced labor in the service of the State
(the German Labor Corps); 4) putting political enemies and
Jewish, Communist and Socialist jobholders in concentration
camps.

     What Adolf Hitler & Co. did to Germany in less than six
years was applauded wildly and ecstatically by most Germans. He
lifted the nation from post-War defeatism. Under the swastika
Germany was unified. His was no ordinary dictatorship, but rather
one of great energy and magnificent planning. The "socialist"
part of National Socialism might be scoffed at by hard-&-fast
Marxists, but the Nazi movement nevertheless had a mass basis.
The 1,500 miles of magnificent highways built, schemes for cheap
cars and simple workers' benefits, grandiose plans for rebuilding
German cities made Germans burst with pride. Germans might eat
many substitute foods or wear ersatz clothes but they did eat.

     What Adolf Hitler & Co. did to the German people in that
time left civilized men and women aghast. Civil rights and
liberties have disappeared. Opposition to the Nazi regime has
become tantamount to suicide or worse. Free speech and free
assembly are anachronisms. The reputations of the once-vaunted
German centres of learning have vanished. Education has been
reduced to a National Socialist catechism.

     Pace Quickened. Germany's 700,000 Jews have been tortured
physically, robbed of homes and properties, denied a chance to
earn a living, chased off the streets. Now they are being held
for "ransom," a gangster trick through the ages. But not only
Jews have suffered. Out of Germany has come a steady, ever-
swelling stream of refugees, Jews and Gentiles, liberals and
conservatives, Catholics as well as Protestants, who could stand
Naziism no longer. TIME's cover, showing Organist Adolf Hitler
playing his hymn of hate in a desecrated cathedral while victims
dangle on a St. Catherine's wheel and the Nazi hierarchy looks
on, was drawn by Baron Rudolph Charles von Ripper, a Catholic who
found Germany intolerable.

     Meanwhile, Germany has become a nation of uniforms, goose-
stepping to Hitler's tune, where boys of ten are taught to throw
hand grenades, where women are regarded as breeding machines.
Most cruel joke of all, however, has been played by Hitler & Co.
on those German capitalists and small businessmen who once backed
National Socialism as a means of saving Germany's bourgeois
economic structure from radicalism. The Nazi credo that the
individual belongs to the state also applies to business. Some
businesses have been confiscated outright, on other what amounts
to a capital tax has been levied. Profits have been strictly
controlled. Some idea of the increasing Governmental control and
interference in business could be deduced from the fact that 80%
of all building and 50% of all industrial orders in Germany
originated last year with the Government. Hard-pressed for food-
stuffs as well as funds, the Nazi regime has taken over large
estates and in many instances collectivized agriculture, a
procedure fundamentally similar to Russian Communism.

     When Germany took over Austria she took upon herself the
care and feeding of 7,000,000 poor relations. When 3,500,000
Sudetens were absorbed, there were that many more mouths to feed.
As 1938 drew to a close many were the signs that the Nazi economy
of exchange control, barter trade, lowered standard of living,
"self-sufficiency," was cracking. Nor were signs lacking that
many Germans disliked the cruelties of their Government, but were
afraid to protest them. Having a hard time to provide enough
bread to go round, Fuhrer Hitler was being driven to give the
German people another diverting circus. The Nazi controlled
press, jumping the rope at the count of Propaganda Minister Paul
Joseph Goebbels, shrieked insults at real and imagined enemies.
And the pace of the German dictatorship quickened as more & more
guns rolled from factories and little more butter was produced.

     In five years under the Man of 1938, regimented Germany had
made itself one of the great military powers of the world today.
The British Navy remains supreme on the seas. Most military men
regard the French Army as incomparable. Biggest question mark is
air strength, which changes from day to day, but most observers
believe Germany superior in warplanes. Despite a shortage of
trained officers and a lack of materials, the German Army has
become a formidable machine which could probably be beaten only
by a combination of opposing armies. As testimony to his nation's
puissance, Fuhrer Hitler could look back over the year and
remember that besides receiving countless large-bore statesmen
(Mr. Chamberlain three times, for instance), he paid his personal
respects to three kings (Sweden's Gustaf, Denmark's Christian,
Italy's Vittorio Emanuele) and was visited by two (Bulgaria's
Boris, Rumania's Carol -- not counting Hungary's Regent, Horthy).

     Meanwhile an estimated 1,133 streets and squares, notably
Rathaus Platz in Vienna, acquired the name of Adolf Hitler. He
delivered 96 public speeches, attended eleven opera performances
(way below par), vanquished two rivals (Benes and Kurt von
Schuschnigg, Austria's last Chancellor), sold 900,000 new copies
of Mein Kampf in Germany besides selling it widely in Italy and
Insurgent Spain. His only loss was in eyesight: he had to begin
wearing spectacles for work. Last week Herr Hitler entertained at
a Christmas party 7,000 workmen now building Berlin's new mammoth
Chancellery, told them: "The next decade will show those
countries with their patent democracy where true culture is to be
found."

     But other nations have emphatically joined the armaments
race and among military men the poser is: "Will Hitler fight when
it becomes definitely certain that he is losing that race?" The
dynamics of dictatorship are such that few who have studied
Fascism and its leaders can envision sexless, restless,
instinctive Adolf Hitler rounding out a mellow middle age in his
mountain chalet at Berchtesgaden while a satisfied German people
drink beer and sing folk songs. There is no guarantee that the
have-not nations will go to sleep when they have taken what they
now want from the haves. To those who watched the closing events
of the year it seemed more than probable that the Man of 1938 may
make 1939 a year to be remembered.