Nurnberg Legend

Faber Castle in Stein, Germany, a great, ugly stone pile, is a house that German lead pencils built. The Fabers still live at Faber Castle, but in a former guesthouse, still manufacture pencils on the grounds, but mostly for the Military Government. Since November the castle has housed the foreign pencils and typewriters of the world's press corps covering the Nuernberg trials. Last week the frenzied work, the legendary drinking bouts were over. To one last gigantic press party went judges, prosecutors, almost everyone in Nuernberg but the defendants. Except for a brief Judgment Day reopening (Sept. 23), Faber was ready to take its little niche in journalistic history with such legendary press camps as Paris' Hotel Scribe, the mud-&-stone Press Hostel in Chungking.

In at 4, Out at 6. In the early days the Castle's great rooms were jammed with beds into which the last drunk fell at about 4 a.m. and from which the first wire-association man crawled out about 6. The old buildings were never warm; the men shivered their way out to waiting buses for the five-mile ride to the courthouse. After each session, workrooms were jammed with men screaming into phones in a dozen languages, trying to get London, Brussels, Moscow.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Richard L. Stokes had been the first reporter to check in, and the P-D had consistently run more coverage than any other U.S. paper. He put up cheerfully with sunken tubs with 15 faucets in a panel, the diving bats, the sleek grey rats. (The Overseas News Agency's Robert Gary put one rat out of action with a well-aimed copy of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.) The New York Times's Ray Daniell and radio's nervous Bill Shirer were less patient. They reached the high note of indignation when they went to complain about a powdered-egg breakfast and found the German staff eating steak.

International Ping-pong. Though language barriers tended to keep the Russians to themselves, the more serious-minded comrades played chess with the more serious-minded Americans and Britons; the less serious-minded joined in nightly howling at the bar or entered Ping-pong games involving ten nationalities and scoring in four languages. Even when the British playfully threw glasses of beer at the Russians from the top of a staircase, there was no international crisis. Things were less friendly in the villa, where the women of the press corps were quartered. There American newshens accused both French and Russian ladies (who greatly outnumbered them) of establishing spheres of influence over the bathrooms, and keeping out all but their fellow nationals.

16,500,000 Words Are Not Enough. More than 16 1/2 million words have been filed from Nurnberg. The Russians--who filed almost every document--topped both the Britons and the Americans. As world interest in the trials varied, so did the number of newsmen; at one point this summer there were only five Americans left.

Reporters, packing up last week, were filled with reluctant admiration for the amount of work done at the trial. Many of them felt that the readers of their newspapers would never get the full significance of what had been done here; that the task must await historians. Just to give the historians something more to read, 40 of them have written or are writing books.

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