Old Refrain

Fritz Kuhn was one German that Americans knew well. They remembered pictures of him as the strutting fuehrer of the German-American Bund, of his Madison Square Garden meetings, where the Stars & Stripes and the swastika were bracketed, of his arrest and deportation. One day last week Fritz made news again, but there was nobody around for pictures. He escaped from the Dachau internment camp where he had been awaiting a denazification trial. At week's end, police were still looking for him.

In Germany Kuhn found little of the notoriety he had enjoyed in the U.S. His fellow prisoners envied the food parcels he received from U.S. friends. But when a German official was asked to comment on the escape, he said: "Who is this fellow?"

Through the years of his U.S. heyday, Fritz Kuhn's plodding passion for Adolf Hitler was alloyed by a peripatetic passion for women. Four days after his Dachau escape, a 32-year-old waitress popped up with an old refrain. "Fritz is a very affectionate man," blonde Hedwig Munz told newsmen, "and we will be married as soon as all this trouble is straightened out." And Mrs. Kuhn? She was still the same patient Hausfrau who had stood by Kuhn through all his adventures. Said she: "How can she expect to marry my husband when he still is married to me? That's silly."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.