RUSSIA: Scoop

As part of his campaign to jazz up Izvestia, new Editor Aleksei Adzhubei (who has the advantage of being Nikita Khrushchev’s son-in-law) produced a scoop that was supposed to have come out of Nazi documents captured by the Russians. The scoop: that in October 1941, after invading Russia, Hitler wrote to his Secret Police Boss Heinrich Himmler, confiding his plans “to divide up the huge cake” that he would conquer. This involved, reported Izvestia, “coming to terms with the governments of England and the U.S.A.” The Germans would take everything up to the Ob River east of the Urals; the British would administer the central Siberian plateau between the Ob and the Lena; and the U.S. would get the rest, out to the Kamchatka Peninsula. Hitler also contemplated exterminating the entire Russian people, continued Izvestia.

Neither the British Foreign Office nor the U.S. State Department had ever heard of the idea, and Izvestia did not say that they had. But, said Izvestia in a following editorial, the Bundeswehr of West Germany is being built up by the West to follow in the goose steps of the Wehrmacht, and Russian readers were left to draw their own frightening conclusions.