GERMANY: When the Foehn Blows

The foehn* is a warm, dry wind that tumbles, sometimes with landslide suddenness, down the northern slopes of the Bavarian Alps. In winter and early spring, as it sweeps across Bavaria, it melts the snow and brings to the landscape a strange, bluish haze. German mountain-folk hold to an ancient belief that the foehn also brings sickness and melancholia in its blast.

Last week, the foehn again rolled across Bavaria and in its wake an unpredictable German politician, missing since he fled from the Russians last September, appeared in Munich as unexpectedly as the warm rush of the wind itself. He was Dr. Rudolf Paul, former minister president of Thuringia in the Soviet zone.

Changes of foehn-like abruptness have checkered Dr. Paul’s political meanderings. When Hitler came to power, spectacled Dr. Paul divorced his Jewish wife, who was later sent to her death in the Riga concentration camp. In 1945, the Americans appointed Dr. Paul mayor of Gera in Thuringia. When the Russians took over Gera, Dr. Paul received them in flag-bedecked streets. He joined the Soviet-sponsored Socialist Unity Party and was soon appointed minister president of Thuringia.

Last June, Dr. Paul led an anti-U.S. walkout of Soviet-zone .political leaders at an interzonal unity conference in Munich. Two months later his name headed the list of prominent Soviet-zone Germans backing a proclamation that damned the Marshall Plan. Then one day in September, he and his second wife headed for Potsdam. He was seen boarding a train at the Potsdam station.

In his hiding place in Munich last week, Dr. Paul told a TIME correspondent that he could explain everything. When he was president of Thuringia, he said, the Russians had provided him with an “assistant” who put through Soviet policy in Paul’s name. As for disrupting the Munich conference: “I was coerced to lead the walkout against my wishes.” And his opposition to the Marshall Plan? “I am and always have been for the Marshall Plan. My name was affixed to the proclamation without my knowledge or consent.”

After the Moscow conference of foreign ministers last spring, Dr. Paul said, the Russians tightened their stranglehold on German political leaders in the Soviet zone. He expected an even tougher policy after the London conference.

Chunky, slick-spoken Dr. Paul refused to discuss details of his escape or his activities since September. For some time to come, he thought, it would be best to lie low. He would stay in Bavaria, but in hiding. Said he: “There are Communist agents around here, you know.”

*A similar wind, called the chinook, descends the slopes of the Rockies.