Monday, Mar. 28, 1938

Bottleneck Broken

Pre-Nazi Vienna was a tight bottleneck for Central European news. Correspondents in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Greece kept Vienna bureaus of the great press organizations primed. Thence the news of Central Europe--much of it brewed by good imaginations in Viennese coffeehouses-- flowed out to the world comparatively free of censorship.

Violently upset last week was this clearinghouse press system. During the first hectic days after anschluss (TIME, March 21) the lid of Nazi censorship was harshly clamped on Vienna's journalists. Telephone calls for foreign correspondents were tapped, mail was watched, teletype communications halted. When Adolf Hitler made his belated Vienna speech, 55 newsmen, the bulk of the foreign corps, were summoned to receive press passes, promptly caged at the point of Nazi guns, allowed to watch the scene only through the Chancellery windows.

Nearly half of Vienna's 25-member Anglo-American Press Association found it wise to get out of Vienna--or were bluntly ordered to leave. International News Service's Alfred Tyrnauer, an Austrian Jew, was arrested in the cable office while filing a story, his passport confiscated, his detention ordered; when the U. S. Legation took note, he was released for transfer to the Paris I. N. S. office. The New York Times's, bureau chief, G. E. R. Gedye, who had spent 13 years in Vienna, was ordered to leave the country in three days. His expulsion was countermanded but he would not stay. Marcel W. Fodor, famed Manchester Guardian and Chicago Daily News correspondent who supplied John Gunther and Dorothy Thompson with much of their Hitler-baiting background, thought it best for his health to flee Austria. Acme's Photographer Ernest Kleinberg, a Polish Jew, was taken into "protective custody." By week's end transfer of several foreign news service bureaus to suppression-free Prague, Budapest and other Central European capitals was under way.

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