In Again, Out Again

Few listeners knew where the broadcast was coming from. Even studio technicians of Washington's WOL were in the dark. The program was being piped into the station by telephone, but the control panel gave no clue about its origin. Mysteriously unavailable were WOL General Manager William B. Dolph and Program Director Madeline Ensign. The whole thing had a fine conspiratorial flavor, which was quite in keeping with the business at hand--a radio interview with burly, gap-toothed Jan Valtin (real name: Richard Julius Herman Krebs), who has been hiding out fearful of lethal attention from the GPU and Gestapo ever since he spilled bushels of Communazi beans in his best-selling Out of the Night.

Instigator of these dark proceedings was big, crusading Dorothy Donnell, chief of the radio division of the Department of Justice's Immigration Service. Interested was many a Justice bigwig in having Valtin whoop it up for democracy. Since he lacked the citizenship necessary to appear on Miss Donnell's Government-sponsored I'm An American show, she persuaded him to go on for WOL, wrote a script for the occasion. Neither WOL nor MBS, its network, gave any publicity to the Valtin program. But long-nosed Manhattan Columnist Leonard Lyons sniffed out the news. Forthwith Washington began to stir.But reporters did not spot Valtin before the show and they did not find him afterward. While they waited outside Manager Dolph's penthouse apartment, intending to trail him to the broadcast, Valtin was ushered in by a back door, planted before a mike rigged up that afternoon.

Full of hatred for dictatorship, pious faith in democracy, Valtin said that he had been deafened by the blow of a Nazi whip, would never "fall alive again into the hands of Hitler's secret police." A few days later in Manhattan he fell into the hands of U. S. authorities, was detained on Ellis Island as an alien illegally sojourning in the U. S., until friends came through with $5,000 bail. Red-faced was the Department of Justice's radio division when it learned that the warrant for Valtin's arrest had been issued several days before it decided he ought to broadcast for democracy.

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