Goebbels v. CBS

Last week the Nazis barred CBS from making any broadcasts from Germany. The Nazis were sore about comments made by wry Elmer Davis in Manhattan as follow-up to a CBS radio interview in Berlin with Funnyman Pelham Grenville Wodehouse week before. Said Commentator Davis of Author Wodehouse, released from an internment camp and put at Berlin's swank Hotel Adlon so he could broadcast for the Nazis:

"Mr. Wodehouse seems to have been more fortunate than most of the other Englishmen in his internment camp, whose release would perhaps have had less publicity value for the Germans and of course he was only in an internment camp to begin with, which is a very different thing from a concentration camp. People who get out of such concentration camps as Dachau, for instance--well in the first place not a great many of them get out and when they do, they are seldom able to broadcast."

In Berlin, Funnyman Wodehouse last week began to function as trained seal for the Nazis. In a deep chuckling tone, he described his internment as "an agreeable experience," recounted for short-wave listeners the details of his capture by the Germans. Typical whimsy: "The scene was not one of vulgar brawling. All that happened as far as I was concerned was I was strolling along with my wife one morning when she lowered her voice and said: 'Don't look now but here comes the German Army.' And there they were, a fine body of men, rather prettily dressed in green and carrying machine guns."

Most charitable explanation of Wodehouse's conduct came from his daughter in London. "I make no effort to defend my father," she said. "He is one of those guileless men who take people at their face value so long as they are pleasant. ... I know it is idiotic of him, but that's the sort of man he is. I wish I could stop him."

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