Comic-Strip Generals

One-armed, egg-bald "General Bruno" is a comic-strip character who can do with his one arm what most ordinary mortals would be proud to do with two. In the Bell Syndicate's strip, "Miss Fury" the General is frustrated by Brazilian guerrillas in his campaign to open the way for an Axis invasion. In his latest battle the Brazilians destroyed his soldiers' tanks, guns, helmets and even their belt buckles with metal-dissolving pellets, leaving the bewildered Germans unarmed and helpless under a hail of arrows.

Though General Bruno is pure fiction, he has his counterpart in mysterious General Gunther Niedenfuhr, onetime German Military Attache in Argentina, subsequently Military Attache in Brazil. About the time that General Bruno was getting his mechanized army set for battle, General Niedenfuhr was bounced back to Berlin with other Axis diplomats in South America. But, like his comic-strip colleague, the General had done some good work for his bosses while in Brazil. Last week Brazilians were beginning to learn what lay behind his ingratiating fagade.

General Niedenfuhr had organized an efficient espionage and propaganda organization. Down in the south of Brazil, where an estimated million people of German descent live, he had set about laying the foundation for an effective fifth-column force. Though he did not have the full equipment his fictional colleague enjoys, he organized "shooting clubs" in nearly every good-sized town, used yacht clubs, youth organizations, possibly even a glider school as other fronts. Given time, some Brazilians thought, he might have raised a force of several hundred thousand.

The ultimate goal of all this activity seemed to be the same as General Bruno's efforts: an army which would operate within the country while the Axis invaded from across the South Atlantic. Spy-busting Major Olinto Franca Almeida y Sa,* Police Chief of the State of Sao Paulo, said the Nazi plan was to invade by air last May. The plot was uncovered when the police intercepted a Nazi agent's message. Only the fact that Russia upset the German timetable, guessed the Major, prevented the plot from being carried out.

*Credited last spring with having broken up a Nazi espionage system in southern Brazil, thereby incidentally saving the Queen Mary, with 10,000 troops aboard, from ambush by Nazi U-boats.

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