Exit Dr. Hauptmamn

New Jersey College for Women, a branch of Rutgers University, has an enterprising journalism department. Three months ago it sent several students on a practice assignment: to investigate the disappearance of Dr. Erhard Fernholz, a research chemist at the Squibb Institute in New Brunswick, N. J., who went for a walk in Princeton last December and was never seen alive again.* The students interviewed a Squibb official. He snapped: "Why bother us when you have a disappearance in your own back yard?"

Dashing back to their campus, they stumbled on a big story, already known to the police (who presumably told Squibb Institute). Missing was the college's most widely known professor, Dr. Friedrich Johannes Hauptmann, head of the German department.

Dr. Hauptmann became a celebrity six years ago when the Rutgers trustees tried him for firing an anti-Nazi professor. The trustees exonerated Dr. Hauptmann, but the trial showed that he was an ardent Nazi. Witnesses testified that he had called President Wilson a "Schweinehund," had written to Nazi Propaganda Minister Paul Joseph Goebbels for propaganda material to be used in the U. S.

Last November, ailing Dr. Hauptmann got a leave of absence to go to a hospital. Soon the college learned that friends' letters sent to a forwarding address in Miami had been returned. It was found that no hospital had a record of Dr. Hauptmann, that his last salary check was still in his bank, that his wife and two daughters had disappeared also. Last week the college made a public announcement of the professor's disappearance and it became known that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was investigating. Rumors flew. The Newark News printed a report that the professor was in Germany. The college hardly knew what to think.

* Last week his body was found in Lake Carnegie at Princeton.

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