ON THE SPOT

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 88, 15 April 1939, Page 2 (Supplement)

ON THE SPOT

Adventures Behind The News

BELIEVE me, foreign news has its bright side. There's the casual gentleman in South America who writes: "Dear Sir, —As I was driving down, last night, to the revolution ..." There's the glorious scoop you can land because a highly paid star of a rival newspaper, drunk with more than success, addresses his cable to you by mistake. There's . But my tale is not of the fun and successes of iife. Let me entertain you, if I can, with a story of epic and staggering misfortune. With a moral? Of course. It is this: "Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, never let a day pass without buying a newspaper. You can miss so much—so easily. Slide back, a few years, into the uncomfortable chair of a foreign subeditor. Night after night sorting, shuffling, appraising, rewriting and sometimes cursing the news. Hour after hour it flowed. Cubic yards of news enveloped tne. Roosevelt, Hitler, Savisky, Lindbergh, Kruger, Laurel and Hardy and a hundred others passed in review. The drama, pathos and thrills of an everchanging world were there every night. Skill and concentration prevented the Melbourne wool prices from appearing in the paper a« a French election result or a new census in Liberia. Interesting, vital, gripping, you think, and all that stuff about living on the knife-edge of history. Yes. But there was the bitterness of always having to read about things one never saw. if only I could be there, or there, or there, or somewhere else; see these things happening, be at the source of the news. . . . What stories I could write! At least, I thought so. And then my chance came. I got in the thick of the grandest possible new* I was at the source of the news. I saw the turmoil caused by the news. To borrow the title of this series, I got right behind the news. So far behind, in fact, that I 'never caught up. It happened like this.

ByW. M. Towler

A June holiday lured me to Berlin.

Hitler was already well in the saddle, it seemed, and I thought I would like to see at first hand how he and the Black and Brown Boys were behaving. Now, my German was passable. But the mazes of words in which German papers wrapped their news were the best guaranteed pennyworth of inferiority complex I could get. So I avoided them. And in those earlier days of Nazism English newspapers were unobtainable. Nobody would admit they were confiscated. Only "Sold Out, sir." If you crept up quietly and stepped out from behind a news stand at six o'clock in the morning the English papers were already sold out, sir. Nothing to read, I set out to see the best and worst of Berlin. I learned u. lot about Germany, but nothing so urgent it wouldn't keep until I returned. Saturday came and I found myself in Berlin's famous zoo. Bobbie, dead now, but then the biggest gorilla in captivity, was the star turn. From this lord of beasts it was a natural and easy progress to a storm-troopers' brass band playing beside a table-dotted terrace cafe. And then it began. They got a burst of applause and the conductor had stretched out his arms for an encore, when • another storm-trooper marched through the tables to the raised bandstand and attracted his attention by tapping on his jackboot. The conductor bent down for a moment's whispered conversation.

And then it began. He stretched up and passed on the whispered words to the nearest player. The news, order, or whatever it was, swept round the stormy bandsmen and in three minutes they had packed up their instruments anil marched off. Outside the zoo, it was dusk. A car loaded with newspapers drew up at a ccrner and 30 or 40 people swarmed round to buy them. "Poor chaps, if only they could read the things about Germany that I know, their papers would be worth buying," was my reaction. Feeling very superior, I marched on to dinner, leaving therii standing about in groups reading, arguing, discussing. Later there was whispering groups at street corners. A swift and silently moving big black ear bearing five blackuniformed S.S. men drew up beside one of the groups and three of the guards got out. The one still sitting with the driver pointed to a man in the group. He was seized, bundled into the car and driven away.

A few minutes later a similar capture was made from another streetcorner group by a second carload of S.S. Men. When this happened the rest of the group of talkers silently hurried away. As one of them passed me 1 asked him what was going on. He appeared to think I was mad and hurried on without speaking.

What an odd place Berlin was. 1 must certainly write something about it when I got back to London!

Another car moved slowly along" the street. This time bearing green-grey uniformed special police." They call

them "the field mice." They ignore the general public but supervise and discipline the brown-shirted storm troops. I had seen them in action before, rounding up an odd brown-shirt caught on the street or in a bar in uniform after midnight. As I strolled towards my hotel an S.S. man approached, glowering intently, suspiciously. I patted my pocket to make sure my passport was there. Sick of the Sight of Uniforms In the Wilhelmstrasse 30 or 40 fullyequipped soldiers marched into one of the Government buildings. I went to bed sick of the sight of" uniforms. Next morning I left Berlin. A few peaceful days in the Ehincland and I returned to London. Then I found it out. Half the famous names of that Nazi party had been wiped out. Ex-Chancellor Schleicher and his wife were shot dead in their own home. Hundreds of Nazi stalwarts had been arrested, sentenced, executed. Troops had taken over Government buildings in the Wilhelmstrasse, mounted machine guns on the roofs, ready to quell riot, revolt. All this had happened during mv last day and night in Berlin. It was" June 30, 1934. The great Nazi purge. Back in that sub-editorial chair I said little about my holiday, but settled down to the news, content to take what the more experienced ones provided for me.