Kickbacks and Shakeups

Down a busy Berlin street one day last fortnight marched a detachment of Nazi storm troopers carrying the Nazi flag. On the curb stood the Brooklyn Eagle's onetime Associate Editor Hans V. Kaltenborn, able radio news commentator, with his wife, daughter and 16-year-old son Rolf. Unimpressed, young Rolf turned away to look in a shop window. A German civilian spun him around, slapped him smartly in the face. Father Kaltenborn grabbed the man, marched him off in search of a policeman. A crowd led by a storm trooper forced Mr. Kaltenborn to release the patriot. As he took his family out of Germany that night, Mr. Kaltenborn reported the affair to U. S. Consul George Messersmith without any request for action. The German Press carried no news of the slap. Nor did they publish the fact that last week the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, not the Foreign Office, offered a complete apology to Mr. Kaltenborn.

No such apology went last week to another departing journalist. When Edgar Ansel Mowrer's book on the growth of reaction in Germany, Germany Puts the Clock Back, reached Germany last spring, Nazis did not like it at all. They made a freedom-of-the-press hero out of Mr. Mowrer by trying to force his resignation as Berlin president of the Foreign Press Association (TIME, April 17). Failing at first, the Government boycotted the Association until the Chicago Daily News finally ordered Mr. Mowrer to end his nine-year service in Berlin, go to Tokyo. He quit Berlin fortnight ago, a week ahead of schedule. When the Association met last week to elect Norman Ebbutt, London

Times correspondent, its new president, it was read a letter in which Mr. Mowrer explained his hasty departure.

He listed twelve foreign correspondents whom the Nazi Government had forced to leave Germany, three who had been jailed, five whose homes had been searched. The departers included Frederick Kuh (United Press), Edward Deuss (International News Service), Raphael Abramowitch and Jacob Lestschinsky (New York Jewish Daily Forward). Last month, Mr. Mowrer wrote, he was officially warned that the German Government "could no longer guarantee his personal safety." The U. S. Consul asked him to get out in a hurry, because ". . . if something had really happened to me, the German Government would have been able to disclaim responsibility. Germany . . . wishes to create the impression that the foreign Press is completely free and independent. On the other hand, it wanted to bring about the departure of those correspondents whose knowledge of the situation was great enough to make them impervious to German propaganda." The letter concluded, "It is a thousand times better to dissolve the Association than to allow it to be coerced into conformity."

Observers reported last week that foreign kickbacks against Nazi bullying were beginning to worry Chancellor Hitler, that fear of Germany's being isolated was giving him twinges of claustrophobia as the time for new international discussions of disarmament and rearmament at Geneva approached. To the West, the conservative newspaper Neue Preussiche Kreuz-Zeitung was inspired last week to see in French publicity about secret German armaments, "only one aim, namely, to prepare ... a panic resulting in a demand for measures of force against Germany." To the East, a semi-official communique soothed: "Relations between Germany and Russia are now, as always, normal and are in no manner impaired by the Russo-Italian pact" (TIME, Sept. 11). But Hitler felt less sure of Russia last week as Russia, Poland and Rumania began conversations looking toward an entente. Last week Hitler gave his Foreign Department a shakeup and observers watched closely to see what it boded.

As the strongest man Germany could send to Japan Hitler picked his Ambassador to Moscow Dr. Herbert von Dirksen, longtime chief of the Foreign Office's Eastern Department, a 100% Nazi. To Moscow went Rudolf Nadolny, Nazi Ambassador to Turkey who has spent most of his time in Geneva fighting for German rearmament. From the post of Consul General in New York City, popular Dr. Otto Kiep was given an "indefinite leave of absence," after seven years in the U. S. Dr. Kiep politely explained it was "merely a routine shift" and said he was "looking forward to my new post." Real explanation apparently was that he had not effectively fought anti-Nazi feeling in New York. Diplomatic observers last week predicted that Chancellor Hitler will soon take over the Foreign Ministry personally, taking with him as Under-Secretary famed Jew-Soviet-hater, Alfred Rosenberg.

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