The Civilian Bag

As the political prison camps of Germany emptied, the political prison camps of the Allies filled. Among captured civilians were:

P: Rachele Mussolini, plump widow of the Duce. She was caught, along with her two youngest children, a jugful of jewelry and $120,000 cash, by partisans as she sought refuge in Switzerland. The Italians turned her over, as a harmless matron, to U.S. custody.

P: Ezra Pound, Idaho-born poet-author, expatriate since 1907, a star Axis propagandist. He was arrested near Genoa.

P: Albrecht Luitpold Ferdinand Michel, Prince of Bavaria, scion of the Wittelsbachs and the Stuarts (a few British Jacobites still regard the Wittelsbach line as Britain's rightful sovereigns). He was taken by U.S. troops in a Bavarian hunting lodge. His father, former Crown Prince Rupprecht, Field Marshal in Kaiser Wilhelm's armies, was taken by the Allies in Italy.

P: John Amery (contrary son of Britain's Secretary for India Leopold Amery), another renegade Axis propagandist. He was threatened with execution by Italian partisans, saved his life by pleading British citizenship.

P: Hjalmar Schacht, onetime wizard Minister of Nazi Economics and President of the Reichsbank. He was discovered in a little Italian village, dapper and professing not to know why he had lost favor with Hitler.

P: Friedrich Wilhelm Victor August Ernst of Prussia, former Crown Prince of Hohenzollern Germany, a crony of the Nazis. He was found in Baden, according to the Paris radio, by the French First Army.

P: Constantin von Neurath, first Nazi Foreign Minister, ex-Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. He was also taken by French forces.

P: Nicholas Horthy, aging (76) Admiral and Regent of Hungary until Hitler jailed him six months ago. He was held in custody by U.S. troops, met U.S. newsmen, begged for understanding of Hungary's forced position as an Axis satellite, asked for a place at the "peace conference," refused to "say anything against the old [pre-Hitler] Germany."

P: Ferenc Szalasi, ex-Nazi Premier of Hungary who succeeded Horthy, caught at Mattsee, in Austria, where he had been hiding for months with 23 relatives.

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