To answer some of the questions our subscribers have been asking about how TIME gathers, verifies, writes and distributes its news.

Now that everyone is wondering about Nazi morale and how it is standing up under month after month of bombings and defeats, many of our readers have been asking where we get the news from inside Germany that you find in almost every issue of TIME.

The answer is "mostly from Stockholm" - for Sweden is so close to the heart of Hitler's Europe that, when the wind is from the south, people there can sometimes smell the smoke of burning Berlin. And always there are hundreds of travelers and fugitives who have just seen with their own eyes and heard with their own ears what is going on across the Baltic.

So TIME has posted one of its most experienced foreign correspondents in Stockholm: John Scott, who knows first-Scorr hand every country of occupied Europe except Norway and Greece--speaks Russian as well as he speaks English, knows German, Spanish and French, and is now fluent (if not always grammatical) in Swedish.

You may remember Scott as the TIME editor who lived ten years under Stalin's rule, worked first as a welder in Siberian Magnitogorsk, later as Moscow correspondent 'for the London News Chronicle and the New York Times.

Sweden is as near to Germany as New York is to Boston--or Chicago to Detroit--so it is small wonder that there are so many people in Stockholm with firsthand news from the Reich.

"In fact," Scott writes, "the biggest problem' is to find out whom you can believe. Many people here have intimate and reliable contacts inside the German blockade and can provide direct, fresh information. But Stockholm is also rife with rumors and rumormongers who come to me with fantastic stories of intrigues and escapes--advice, warnings and obscure mutterings of all kinds.

"Characters of every description--code experts, secret agents, odd icy blondes, crumbs of European aristocracy" keep coming in to see him all the time--partly because our just-launched Scandinavian Edition has focused so much attention on TIME and partly because Scott's latest book (Duel for Europe) has become a Swedish bestseller.

The newspapers of all Europe pour into Sweden within a few days after publication--so another of Scott's jobs is to follow what the people of each nation are themselves being told about how the war is going. He reads papers in German, Russian and Swedish himself--has a multilingual secretary read those in Finnish, Danish and Norwegian, telling him the high spots and translating the full text of the most important items. And very soon he plans a trip to distracted Finland to see for himself what is happening to that unhappy land.

To open TIME'S Stockholm office, Scott crossed the Atlantic on a little unescorted merchant ship and flew to Sweden in the bombbay of a disarmed British Mosquito bomber that can carry only one passenger and flies only on moonless nights to lessen the chances of being shot down. His listening post is one of two we have set up in neutral European countries to get the truth out of Festung Euro pa and into the pages of TIME. The other is in Switzerland - and very soon I hope to be able to bring you word of still a third TIME office right under Hitler's nose.

Cordially,

P.S. The 16,000 copies of TIME'S first Scandinavian issue sold out within a few hours. (This is about the same as if a foreign language magazine in the U.S. started off with a 325,000-copy sale.)

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