Whose Bestseller?

It was a minor journalistic coup. North American Newspaper Alliance crowed that on March 8 it would release (in the New York Times and 50 other papers) 18 excerpts from the wartime diaries of Paul Joseph Goebbels. Doubleday & Co., which had sold pieces of the Nazi propagandist's day-by-day jottings to the syndicate, had also scored a coup: Doubleday's 200,000-word version would be the Book-of-the-Month Club selection (700,000 copies) for May.

In Washington, all this drum-beating caught the ear of George Middleton, aging (67) ex-dramatist (Polly with a Past), now a copyright expert in the Office of Alien Property. Middleton began asking Doubleday questions: Who had found the diaries and brought them to the U.S.? And why hadn't they been turned over to OAP as Government property?

Doubleday had few answers. It said that the diaries had gone unrecognized in Berlin until they fell into the hands of a civilian military government employee. He had turned them over to Frank Earl Mason, a onetime Hearst executive and ex-vice president of NBC, now head of Fireside Press, a small Manhattan publishing house. Mason had turned them over to Doubleday to publish. When Alien Property Boss David Bazelon asked Mason to tell his story of the diaries, Mason replied that he was "too busy" to discuss it for a month or so.

As OAP and the State Department dug into the matter last week, they unearthed a few more facts. Last year, when Herbert Hoover went to Germany to make a food survey for President Truman, Frank Mason went along, as press-relations man. He had dug up precious prose in Berlin before. As an I.N.S. correspondent after World War I, he had found the log of the U-boat that sank the Lusitania. Also in the Hoover party were Louis Lochner, prewar A.P. bureau chief in Berlin, and Hugh Gibson, onetime ambassador to Belgium. Lochner translated the diaries for Mason, and Gibson is an editorial adviser to Doubleday. The original manuscript is now in the possession of Herbert Hoover's war library at Stanford.

Despite the investigations, N.A.N.A. still planned to release its series. (LIFE bought excerpts for its March 29 issue.) But Doubleday was in a swivet. It postponed publication of its book until the question of ownership could be cleared up. If OAP claimed the diaries, and it looked as if it would, the Government could reap the profits from this bestseller.

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