POLICEMAN KNIGHT

Evening Star, Issue 20983, 23 December 1931, Page 2

POLICEMAN KNIGHT

Vienna alone can boast of a policeman (non-commissioned) who is a knight, says a ‘Daily Mail’ correspondent. Ho is District Inspector “Sir” Karl Soehnel, and he was created a Knight of the Skanderbeg Order of Albania by King Zog, whose life he saved when an attack was made on the King outside the Opera-house in Vienna on February 20. As the King left the Opera-house by a side, door shots were fired at him, and his aide-de-camp was killed. Inspector Soehnel, as he told me, was just in time to throw his arms round an ex-officer of fhe Austro-Hungarian army called

Edo Tgjelossi, when ho was taking cW liberate aim with a revolver. “I have policeman blood in my, veins,” District Inspector “Sir” Karl Soehnel told me as he took off his heavV uniform cloak on returning from a round of duty to the little police station near the Vienna Opera-house, which is the busiest and most important in the city after the police headquarters. “My father was a policeman, but ho did not intend me to be one, I- started, life in a Vienna restaurant, and I was! an hotel waiter at Riva, on Lake! Garda, in the Austrian Tyrol, before being called up for military service, atj the end of which I joined the Vienna police.” Inspector Soehnel is the most popular, man in the Vienna police force. Ho. controls the district which includes the j principal hotels and also the liveliest traffic centre, on the Ringstrasse before the Opera, and is a familiar figure.to most foreign visitors who stay at the Ring hotels He has arrested more criminals single-handed than any other police officer in Vienna. He was in the Burg Theatre bh the night, four years ago, when Menria Carnicu shot dead in a box the Macedonian leader, Panizza, in the presence of Panizza’s wife, whom, affer she had fainted, he carried down the main staircase. He speaks seven languages, but does not count English among them, though he knows a good deal cf English, and it is his dearest wish to go to England* He is having his children taught English as their principal foreign language.Inspector Soehnel wears on his breast with the order pinned there by King Zog the long-service medal of tho Austrian police. On tho wall of his sitting room in his suburban home is the framed document, signed by-King Zog, appointing him a Ritter "of tha , Skanderbeg Order.