Herr Brickendrop

Joachim von Ribbentrop hoped almost to the end "that he might be saved by dis sension between the Allies. It was the last of the many mistakes made by the worst foreign minister of modern times.

Last week British agents found the one time wine salesman in the Hamburg apart ment of a 35 -year-old divorcee. Reporters first heard that he was lying abed, naked; later, that he had on pink and white pajamas. He asked his captors if they would see to the delivery of letters he had written to Montgomery, Eden and "Wincent" Churchill, professing that he had never wanted war between Germany and the western Allies. He was, he said, "on a mission for the FUehrer."

Colossal ineptitude had been Foreign Minister Ribbentrop's hallmark.* When he visited Britain in 1937, peddling collaboration with Hitler against Russia, he greeted King George with a Nazi salute and earned the sobriquet of "Herr Brickendrop." At a dinner with Winston Churchill, Ribbentrop blurted: "The next war will be different for we will have the Italians on our side." Churchill grinned and cracked: "That's only fair--we had 'em last time."

Taped to Ribbentrop's groin was a phial of poison like the one Heinrich Himmler had carried and used. Ribbentrop gave his up, unused.

* Prince Louis Ferdinand Hohenzollern, grand son of the Kaiser and former Ford Motor Co. employe, last week told A. P. Correspondent Louis Lochner that he had approached Ribbentrop in the autumn of 1938 as a secret and unofficial emissary of President Roosevelt. Roosevelt, said the prince, wanted to arrange a meeting with Hitler, Mussolini and Neville Chamberlain to avert the approaching war. Ribbentrop's only an swer to the prince's suggestion was a threat to have him thrown out of the Luftwaffe.

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