"I Am Able to Reveal"

Louis P. Lochner's credentials as a German expert are of the best. He has a German wife, spent 18 years in Germany for the Associated Press. His good sources and good friends include monarchists of imperial days, Republicans of the Weimar days, and post-1933 Nazis. He has had exclusive interviews with Hitler and acclaims himself as "the first foreign correspondent allowed to follow [the] German army into Poland." For his labors, he got a 1939 Pulitzer Prize and 18 months in a German internment camp. On his return to the U.S. he preached from lecture platform, book and radio that Hitler is fighting a "one-man war" and that Germany has a "Front of Decent People."

Two months ago the A.P. sent Lochner back to Germany. His "exclusive" cables on the way immediately blossomed with the phrase, "I am able to reveal. . . ." They had an authoritative air: "As [the late Baron von Bose] put it to me only a few hours before he was murdered by S.S. men"; "As a near relative of Goering put it to me," etc. One hot tip came from the only man outside Germany of the three persons who had seen Hindenburg's will. ("From a casual phrase dropped at a dinner party somewhere in Europe I stumbled on the fact. . . . This 'third man' seemed flabbergasted for a moment at my detection. . . .")

Last week balding, tireless Correspondent Lochner, 58, was hard at it. His latest stories seemed as Sax Rohmerish as the "informed" reports that stream incessantly from the rumor factories of Stockholm, Lisbon and Berne. But many a U.S. editor, recalling Lochner's Pulitzer prestige, gingerly played them deadpan. Sample Lochner:

P: "Goering . . . is regarded by his own physician as physically and mentally finished . . . now spends most of the time in bed worrying over the possibility that he may be deprived of the jewels and paintings." Source: "A German informant, whom I have known for years."

P: Rommel and Himmler were in on the plot to kill Hitler last July 20, but Rommel got killed before he was found out, and Himmler "reneged."

P: "Hitler was badly hurt. His hearing apparently has been impaired permanently. . . . Since then he often loses his memory . . . for days is unable to function. . . . Occasionally he swoons. Frequently speech fails him. . . . He snaps out of his fits of despondency" when he is shown movies of the conspirators, hanging naked, "deriving [from them] a vicarious, sadistic satisfaction."

Rival press associations, which neither confirmed nor tried to scotch the Lochner stories, nervously waited to see whether the A.P.'s German ace was on his way to another Pulitzer Prize, or whether his "inside information" would eventually assay as low as similar lurid accounts from the anonymous "Swedish travelers in Germany" who always know the Wilhelmstrasse "inside."

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