LONG SUSPECTED

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 76, 19 June 1941, Page 6

LONG SUSPECTED

i GERMAN OFFICIALS IN U.S.A. * I 1 German diplomatic and consular off ficials in the United States have been ; suspected so long of working mischief i against the country’s security and internal peace that the decision to close .all consulates and expel their staffs lean hardly be deemed surprising. ;! Before America’s entry into the last | wa r the German record of espionage ,'and sabotage was of the blackest Head ,j °f the whole organisation was Franz | von Papen. military attache at the Gerjman Embassy and now Ambassador to Turkey, who was proved to have made I Uie fullest use of his diplomatic privileges to hamper American aid to the ! Allies by bomb plots and other means. ; Having been detected in an attempt to j foment war between the United States , and Mexico, he was eventually ex- ! P elled While he was on his way back .to Germany his papers were seized bv the British authorities and the full j range of his activities was revealed. HITLER’S AIDE AS CONSUL Some years before the present war ; the United States Government was 1 forced to take notice of the GermanAmerican Bund, a Nazi organisation j intended to establish the power of the Thud Reich among American citizens of German birth or descent. This and other developments led in 1937 to the setting-up of a Congressional Committee on Un-American Activities, under the chairmanship of Mr Martin Dies. •Yu h n Y orked moi,e or less in parallel wffh Mr J. Edgar Hoover and the federal Bureau of Investigation. Fhe suspicion resting on German coninin r °? cials was deepened early in 1939. when Captain Fritz Weidemann, Hitlers former aide-de-camp, was appointed Consul at San Francisco In July of last year Mr Hoover’s bureau was directed to make a nation-wide investigation of Fifth Column and subversive elements, and a little later the Secretary of State. Mr Cordell Hull announced that the Government intended to make a broader inquiry into consular activities than the bureau had so far undertaken. LARGE CONSULAR STAFFS The Inter-State Commission on Crime simultaneously reported suspicious increases in the staffs of German con | sulates and of som« prominent German I tirrns. in spite of the reduction in their i legitimate business. It declared that espionage, propaganda and sabotage were being developed by Germany into tr» C Lr°wa C r. e " eCliVe Weap ° ns ,han ■"