Ebbutt, Langen, Putzy

Two of the three German journalists, ordered by the British Home Office to leave London (TIME, Aug. 16), packed their bags last week and returned to the Fatherland. They were pursued by indignant shouts from the British press, for the Third Reich had retaliated by ordering intelligent, slightly pontifical Norman Ebbutt, for twelve years correspondent in Berlin of London's almost sacred Times, to be replaced by ''somebody less concerned with trivialities and more with facts." The British were shocked, regarded it as a blunder for the German Government to suggest that the dispatches of Norman Ebbutt, a distinguished journalist, were unfair. He got into trouble with Nazis in 1933 for reporting truthfully that many Germans were afraid to vote against the Government in the plebiscite because of the possibility of marked ballot papers, but as recently as 1935 some of his dispatches were reproduced in Berlin newsorgans because they pleased Nazi bigwigs.

"The Times represents a section of opinion almost as favorable to any understanding with Germany as any in Great Britain. That opinion is now alienated. ... To expel a Times correspondent amounts almost to a diplomatic incident," thundered the News Chronicle. A spokesman of the Times said with icy dignity: "We are not going to send a man to Berlin at dictation of the Nazis. Unless the Germans suffer an attack of sense within the next few days and keep Ebbutt, we shall leave the Berlin post vacant."

If the Nazis had not taken their revenge by cracking down on Ebbutt the reasons for the Germans' expulsion would probably never have been made public. As it was the British press got their own back by delving into the facts, produced the following explanation j

The Germans were kicked out not because they were doing espionage work against the British Government but because they were agents of a Nazi organization, controlled by the German Foreign Office, whose job was to keep Berlin informed of the doings of Germans in Britain. Only one of the three expelled Germans, Werner von Crome of the Berliner Lokalanzeiger, was recognized by the Foreign Press Correspondents Association; the other two, Franz Otto Wrede and Wolf Dietrich Langen, were working for a German news agency specializing in news of Germans living abroad. Of these Langen, supposed to be a close friend of No. 2 Nazi Colonel General Hermann Wilhelm Goring, was lately thrown out of Fascist Italy for promoting the Nazi cause too zealously there. According to the London Daily Herald, "the principal count against Langen was that he intimidated his fellow countrymen to use them as informers.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933 some 500 secret police, intelligence men, and agents of the Ministry for Propaganda descended on London, began to check up on Germans living permanently or temporarily in Britain. Last week the New York Times' astute commentator "Augur" estimated that there are 20,000 Germans in London alone--including refugees, businessmen, domestic servants-many of whom have been enrolled willingly or otherwise in various Nazi organizations by such agents as Langen. The organization of domestic servants is so closely supervised that the British Foreign Office has warned its members not to engage German servants who might pick up some delicate tidbit of information.

One German who has undoubtedly been of interest to Langen & Co. is Harvard-educated Ernst ("Putzy") Hanfstaengl, onetime chief of Foreign Press Relations in Germany and a favorite of Hitler, who liked to hear him play the piano. Last February Putzy fell from grace, fled to Switzerland, thence to London. He had indiscreetly called Joachim von Ribbentrop Nazi Ambassador to London, "Bnckendrop."* He had referred to the Moors fighting in Spain for German-aided General Franco as the "new friends of Aryan culture."

An Austrian friend last week gave the press an account of Dr. Hanfstaengl's abrupt departure from Germany: He got a telephone call asking him to go to Spam as a special courier of Hitler, hurried to the waiting plane. At Leipzig, where the plane halted, he became definitely uneasy when a group of Hitler special guards climbed into the ship. At this point Putzy opened a letter just handed to him. It said that since he thought so little of General Franco and so much of the Red Government in Spain he was to receive an opportunity to meet his Red friends. The guards were to hurl him from the plane over Leftist Spam. At Munich, next stop, Putzy managed to slip away, took 17 hours to escape to the Swiss frontier. Shortly after he reached Zurich he was invited by the Government to return to Germany "because the whole affair was a practical joke."

*A reference to the diplomatic brick dropped on British toes by Ribbentrop when he greeted King George with a Nazi salute (TIME, Feb. 15).

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