Foreign News: Operation in Turkey

For 20 years Turkish Foreign Minister Numan Menemencioglu has intermittently suffered from an abscessed lung. Until last week 18 operations, including the insertion of three platinum ribs, had been performed on him by a brilliant German surgeon, General Professor Doctor Ferdinand Sauerbruch, whose patients once included the late King George V of England.

Fortnight ago, at a party he gave for Wendell Willkie (TIME, Sept. 28), Foreign Minister Menemencioglu’s lung began bothering him again. At that time General Professor Doctor Sauerbruch was as busy as a surgeon could be—with the lacerated Nazi armies on the Russian front. But last week he flew to Ankara in Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop’s private plane, did his 19th operation on the Menemencioglu lung.

It was the same from the Arctic to the Mediterranean. There was nothing to hinder the Nazis but the hatred they bred. Europe waited for the United Nations to act. The United Nations waited for Churchill and U.S. military men to make up their minds.