Gentlemen of the Press

In woods near Bagnoles-de-1'Orne, French gendarmes stumbled last week on two dead Italians whose throats had been slashed, whose bodies were riddled with bullets. Investigation had scarcely begun when inspectors of the Surete Nationale (Scotland Yard) suddenly stepped in and took charge of the case. For the dead men were no mere murdered tourists but the famed exiled Italian anti-Fascist Brothers Carlo & Nello Roselli. For years in Paris they have published Giustizia e Liberta, organ of fugitive Italian liberals. To the Surete their killing had all the earmarks of a political murder. The bodies were found day after an article had appeared in the Roselli paper bemoaning the murder of Socialist Deputy Giacomo Matteoti by Fascists in Rome just 13 years before.

Carlo, a history professor at University of Florence, was banished to Italy's Lipari Islands in 1926, escaped to Paris in 1929, joined his brother who had also found Italy too hot for him. Carlo's anti-Fascist activities caused an order for his banishment from France in 1931, but he obtained successive prolongations of his residence permit, and when Leon Blum's Popular Front Government came into office his haven seemed secure.

A good friend of the brothers was Francesco Nitti, nephew of Francesco Nitti, Prime Minister of Italy, 1919-20. Uncle Nitti, a full-blooded anti-Fascist was hounded out of Rome in 1925, later went to live in Paris. It was with Nephew Nitti that Carlo escaped from his island prison. To the Suerete last week Francesco Nitti declared: "The murder of the Roselli brothers could have been committed . . . only by experts in political crime. . . .

Some considered Carlo one of the most determined enemies of the Mussolini regime. He had preserved contact with his friends in Italy and was able to print information which the Rome Government found embarrassing." One kind of embarrassing information that Carlo continually published which very probably brought him to his death was stolen lists of daily instructions to the tightly controlled Italian press from the Propaganda Ministry. Few hours before the Roselli murders, last week in Manhattan Editor Girolamo Valenti of La Stampa Libera, also antiFascist. printed a five-month set of these instructions which he admitted came to him "from Paris."

Excerpts : "January 11--Don't reproduce the correspondence from Rome to The Christian Science Monitor on the popularity of Minister Ciano.

"February 2--Speaking of the Pope's illness, just say, without making it appear a real denial, that the news about the expected arrival of an English physician is false.

"February 26--Insist on the eventuality that Eden may leave the Foreign Office post. . . .

"March 5--Absolutely suppress any news of the arrival in Naples of wounded volunteers from Spain on one of our hospital ships.

"March 7--Don't publish anything about the Rex having met a terrible storm between the Azores and Gibraltar. . . .

"March 12--Don't criticize the Rexist [Belgian Fascists] movement of Degrelle. . . .

"April 7--Do not fail to bring into relief the super-power and the immorality of the adventurer Stalin.

"April 14--Reproduce and enlarge the news-dispatch by "Stefani" [Italian news agency] from London about the invoking of a big fire that could destroy the filthy popular section of London, unworthy of a civilized epoch. Add that had Edward VIII remained on the throne, he would have remedied the situation.

"May 6 -- Express deep sympathy to Germany for the loss of the Hindenburg.

There must not be published any article or reference to the English Coronation." The man who keeps Italy's press in this straitjacket is 50-year-old Dino Odoardo Alfieri who became Italy's Minister of Press & Propaganda in 1936 when Mussolini's son-in-law Count Galeazzo Ciano left that Ministry for the Foreign Office. According to gossip in Rome, Minister Alfieri, who prides himself on being a lady-killer and personally selects every stenographer in his employ, got the job because Mussolini's high-spirited daughter dropped a hint to papa. He was badly wounded in the War, got a row of much-prized medals, joined the Fascist Party after the March on Rome, became Under-Secretary in the Ministry of Corporations in 1929, Under secretary of State for Press & Propaganda in 1935. Last week he saw to it that the Roselli murders did not unduly distract Italian breakfast tables.

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