Autumn Roundup

Methodically cleaning up their enemies, Gestapo and affiliated agents were ferreting last week in a dozen European countries, and as they worked, names almost forgotten in the Blitztempo of events again turned up.

A gaunt, Machiavellian man was arrested at the Rumanian frontier. He was onetime Polish Foreign Minister Colonel Josef Beck, who had counted Hermann Goering among his hunting friends, escaped Goering's airmen by fleeing to Rumania in September 1939. Several Gestapo attempts to return him to Germany were foiled by Rumanian police. Last week, according to D.N.B., Beck was arrested by Iron Guard and Gestapo agents as he tried to escape "disguised as an Englishman." In his pocket was a British diplomatic passport and 2,000,000 lei ($20,000).

Another figure from the past who reappeared was Marshal Edward Smigly-Rydz, Poland's rusted little iron man and chief of her vanquished Army, who deserted his fighting troops and skipped across to Rumania a jump ahead of the German Army. From his Carpathian mountain villa, where he had led a life of dignified internment, the Gestapo hauled him to Bucharest for investigation in connection with alleged espionage and sabotage in Rumania, said to involve 7,000 refugee Poles.

Arriving in Canada, Hans Rott, onetime Austrian Secretary of State for Labor, mentioned the half-forgotten name of a politician who once tried to double-cross Hitler at his own game: Kurt von Schuschnigg. In a heatless, lightless cell on the top floor of the Gestapo headquarters in Vienna's dingy Metropol Hotel. Austria's last Chancellor, doomed to slow death, is almost blind, according to Rott, as a result of Gestapo torture.

Vienna playboy Prince Ernst Ruediger von Starhemberg, who modernized and commanded Austria's Heimwehr, is now a lieutenant in the Free French Air Force, was rapped in the British Parliament last week as "the man who assassinated democracy in Austria."

In France, mountainous Edouard Herriot, three times Premier, last President of the Chamber of Deputies, Mayor of Lyon, whose booming voice has resounded in French politics since 1905, was arrested by the secret police of Vichy. Having sought security from the Nazis in Switzerland, M. Herriot erred in believing unoccupied France was safe for Radical Socialists, returned.

Deprived of French citizenship was Alexis Leger ("greatest living diplomat"), onetime Permanent Secretary General in the Foreign Ministry, reputedly the "brains" behind French foreign policy from 1933 until ousted by Reynaud in May 1940. His fame as a surrealist poet was also in eclipse because surrealism is frowned upon in the stern New Order.

A pathetic 19-year-old youth, whose name is inscribed at the top of a dark page of German history, entered the Reich last week handcuffed to a Gestapo agent and guarded by another. He was Herschel Grynszpan, whose shot in Paris in 1938 set off the greatest Nazi pogrom. Released from the Paris Sante Prison when that capital fell, he reportedly joined the refugee stream, surrendered at Toulon, where he was later sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment by a French court "under German supervision." In Berlin he will face the notorious Volksgericht, which keeps two headsmen busy.

In the best Axis tradition, Spain also posted a death list of names prominent in pre-Franco Spain. Ubiquitous, little Luis Companys, Catalan journalist, lawyer, patriot, who was acclaimed President of Catalonia in 1936, was discovered in Nantes by the Gestapo, garroted in Spain on orders from Franco.

Condemned to death after being returned from France were Cipriano Rivas Cherif, brilliant dramatist, lawyer, diplomat; Julian Zugazagoitia, Basque firebrand, deputy, editor, historian, Minister of the Interior in the last Republican Government; Antonio Cruz Salido, onetime Secretary of the Spanish Socialist Party; Carlos Montilla y Escudero, onetime Director of Spanish Railways, Loyalist Counselor in Havana; Miguel Salvador y Carreras, famed music critic, co-founder of the Madrid Philharmonic Society, Loyalist Charge d'Affaires in Copenhagen. Over their bodies, the Spain of Franco aspires to a "prominent place over the ruins of Europe."

Under house arrest in a Seville hotel, ex-King Carol and his titian paramour Magda Lupescu earnestly sought the "protection" of President Roosevelt to keep the Gestapo from sending "The Lupe" and shady-dealing palace favorite Ernest Udarianu back to the Iron Guard. She is accused of having been directly responsible for the assassination of its Leader and No. 1 Rumanian Fascist, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, he of having looted the Treasury for his royal master. Powerless and apparently in the hands of the Gestapo, Carol last week had time to contemplate that Europe was fast becoming too small for the enemies of the dictators.

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