The Press: Men of War

With Adolf Hitler’s Army last week, slowly macerating the Allied forces isolated in Flanders, were three companies of the strangest newsgatherers ever seen on earth. They were Germany’s official Pressekompanie: war correspondents trained to fight as soldiers, grim reporters who took part in the bloody battles which they covered for the German press.

Germany’s PK forces last week numbered 200 men with some 400 technical assistants. Including reporters, cameramen, cartoonists, painters, radio analysts, they gave Germany the fullest war coverage that any army in the field has ever had.

Seven PK men were killed last fall in the German invasion of Poland. A few days before Nazi troops swept into Belgium and Holland, the Deutsches Nachrichten Bureau, Germany’s semi-official news agency, announced that 23 PK reporters had died in action during the war—presumably 16 had been killed in Norway.

Reporter-in-Chief. The man who two years ago sold the idea of soldier-correspondents to the Führer is their Berlin commander: burly, affable Lieut. Colonel Hasso von Wedel. No bureaucratic propaganda official is Colonel von Wedel. A brilliant officer, he has spent 25 of his 41 years in the German Army.

Born in Pomerania, son of an Army officer, Wedel went to cadet school at 15, was the youngest lieutenant to volunteer for service at the front in World War I. He went through the war unscratched, was kept as a member of Germany’s elite postwar General Staff. Almost as corpulent as Göring (from years spent sitting behind a desk at headquarters), Wedel has the same talent for organization. Like Göring, he drinks vast quantities of beer, eats gargantuan meals.

To cover Germany’s surprise attack on Norway two months ago, Wedel sent one company of his PK men: 50 correspondents, 100 technicians. In charge went young Korvetten Kapitän Hahn. Aboard the German cruiser Blücher, when Norwegian shore batteries sent her down in the narrow waters of Oslo Fjord, Captain Hahn took the only films of a naval engagement shot thus far in World War II. Forced to swim, he got ashore with his pictures intact, but ran into a squad of Norwegian soldiers and destroyed the films to keep them from being captured.

Byliners. Only since the Norwegian invasion have PK men been given bylines in the German press. Crack reporters of the campaigns around Trondheim, Andalsnes. and Hamar were Horst Lehmann (correspondent for Hitler’s Volkischer Beobachter, Goebbels’ Der Angriff), Kurt Stolzenberg, Fritz Dettmann, Walter Möller.

PK leader on the Western Front is a blond, blue-eyed, Westphalian farmer’s son, Captain Albert Kost. No career officer like Colonel von Wedel, he has been a Nazi politician for many years, at 45 is a member of Hitler’s submissive Reichstag. Taciturn, quiet, heavy-featured, Captain Kost is an ardent Catholic with five children.

His adjutant is Oberleutnant Paul Ettighoffer, a native of Alsace who fled to Germany when his homeland was restored to France. Frank, charming and loquacious, he is a notable Nazi essayist, novelist, poet. An intellectual, he nevertheless volunteered for service in the regular Army, was cited several times for bravery, later transferred to a PK post. His are the most readable dispatches that come to Berlin from the front.

Newsmen on Tour. U. S. correspondents in Berlin usually get no information except what comes to them from these soldier-journalists, handed out daily at press conferences by the Propaganda Ministry. But so proud, last week, was Adolf Hitler of his Army’s swift advance through Flanders to the English Channel, that he issued a “personal invitation” to three alien news men to visit the front.

Westward across the German border in staff cars rolled Louis Lochner of Associated Press, Frederick Oechsner of United Press, Pierre J. Huss of Hearst’s International News Service, over roads packed with advancing Nazi columns.

Wrote Louis Lochner, as he passed through desolate towns laid waste by Nazi bombers: “In no Belgian community through which we have crossed this week . . . have I noticed more hatred in people’s eyes than in Aerschot, ten miles northeast of Louvain. . . . I suppose the population takes me for a German. If looks could have killed, I would be a corpse today. . . .” Said a Belgian woman, wife of a soldier at the front, to Frederick Oechsner: “I must say the attitude of the German soldiers has been very correct and orderly. . . .”

At week’s end, Hitler’s guests, standing on the shore of the English Channel near Antwerp, heard Nazi soldiers sing: “Wir fahren gegen Engeland—We sail against England!”