OLD ENEMIES MEET.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 291, 8 December 1937, Page 20

OLD ENEMIES MEET.

EVE OF ARMISTICE.

FAMOUS GERMAN EX-SPY. MIMICS OXFORD ACCENT. (Special.—By Air Mail.) LONDON, November 12. Two men who matched their brains against each other in the Great War as implacable foes met as friends, on the same platform in London this week, on the eve of the Armistice celebrations. Ono was Admiral Sir Reginald Hall, chief of the British Intelligence Department during the ■syar. The other was his former prisoner, Captain von Rintelen, brilliant German Secret Service agent. Captain von Rintelen, with a Flanders poppy in his buttonhole told the audience of some of his adventures as a spy.

At the outset he raised a laugh by his startled surprise when a photographer took a flashlight picture of him. "Would you believe it!" he exclaimed, "I was just going to say one of th© qualities a secret service agent must have is never to be taken by surprise."

Captain von Rintelen caused roars of laughter when he gave a theatrical description of how a volunteer naval officer questioned him as he was setting out for the journey which ended in his capture. Mimicking this young man's Oxford accent with extraordinary skill, he recited: "You don't happen by any chance to be a German, I suppose?" To which he replied in the same manner: "You might just as well ask me if I am a negro."

He was never al>lo to pet away with it so easily when dealing with the more experienced men of the Navy, and again he made the audience laugh as he contorted his features to express ferocity and determination as he described the "grim, thin-lipped, square-jawed he-men who know what they want and go for it."

He said that he always employed women to carry his messages to and from Berlin. "My messages," he said, "were always hidden in their underclothes."