A. None of them is of the caliber to succeed Hitler, but Hitler has publicly announced Goering as his successor, and he would automatically take the position if der Fuehrer should die now. In the Party there is nobody to compete with him. The bloodthirsty Himmler, head of the SS Elite Guards and the Gestapo, is merely a policeman, one of great ability, ranking perhaps with the notorious Fouché of the French Revolution, but out of the question as Fuehrer. Goebbels, the advertising director, is the cleverest man in the Party, but he would be lucky to remain alive twenty-four hours after Hitler’s protective hand was removed. He and Himmler are rivals in unpopularity. Who are the rest? Minor figures, as Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, the upstart “Bismarck” of the champagne trade, who if anything is more widely disliked and despised than Goebbels. Hess, of course, has fled. Dr. Ley, the head of the Labor Front, is the type of drunken, racketeering labor gangster who in this country would have gone to the penitentiary under the lash of Westbrook Pegler. Alfred Rosenberg, the Party’s “brain,” could no more succeed Hitler than he could take Joe Louis’s place. The more one scrutinizes the German scene the more one realizes that the war has moved all the big party figures far into the background, leaving only Goering a modest place miles beneath the Fuehrer. The outside world has believed Goering would be an improvement on Hitler, in that he would be more amenable to reason, less aggressive. He would be an improvement only in that he would be weaker. His instincts and intentions are not more Christian than Hitler’s. He would have neither Hitler’s magic hold on the German people nor Hitler’s genius in action, but he is as cruel a man as ever exercised power in a modern state. At the same time he has all the sentimentality which is an almost invariable accompaniment of brutality in this type of German. During the period of the worst Terror, the active Nazi revolution in 1933, Goering was over Himmler in charge of the concentration camps, and at the moment when the Nazi sadists and criminals in charge of the camps were beating to death and torturing and hanging scores of men daily, Goering decreed the severest law against cruelty to animals ever to be passed anywhere.