GERMANY: Steele Case

William Edward Dodd. the fighting North Carolina Baptist who is U. S. Ambassador to Germany, got orders from the State Department last week “to proceed actively to clarify the status” of Miss Isobel Lillian Steele, a U. S. citizen who had sat incommunicado for 88 days in a Nazi jail. The German Government refused to tell Ambassador Dodd what charges have been made against Miss Steele. To her friends, however, there was no great mystery about why Isobel is in trouble.

She is a lean, ebullient girl with a long, inquisitive nose and an assertive chin. Born in Canada, educated in California, naturalized a U. S. citizen, she has studied the violin for four years in Germany. With her German-born mother and younger sister, she has roamed the fringes of Berlin’s international society, having a lovely time, not in the least shy of discussing her opinions of Nazi Germany with all comers. She wrote little articles and translations for a few German papers voicing what she called “honest criticism about this or that.” She dashed off long chatty letters to U. S. friends, free-lance articles to editors. Mostly sympathetic toward the Nazi regime, they were larded with “honest criticism.”

To her friends Miss Steele predicted Adolf Hitler’s Blood Purge five months early: “All the corrupted elements will be eliminated, I hope, without too much disorder and bloodshed. . . . Too many small-minded individuals and crooks have wiggled their way into the game already! But the Government is not blind, thank God!”

Again, she wrote of having missed a party given by a wealthy Polish Count at which everyone was arrested because the host was “apparently a notorious Polish Spy.”

According to Isobel’s mother, who hastily decamped from Germany shortly after her daughter’s arrest, Isobel became terribly outspoken against the Hitler regime in the presence of a Nazi suitor of her younger Sister Marion.

Not only of Nazi Germany did ebullient Miss Steele have things to reveal. Wrote she to friends in Texas: “A Princess Bagnatiov — former ruler of Georgia [Russia] — called on me and gave me the lowdown on what is developing in Japan and Russia. Right now Japan has surrounded Russia and will slowly choke her to death by pressing in from all sides. She is going to give me valuable information about the situation.”

Later: “I hear from fairly good sources that America is on the verge of Communism. . . . The sailors on the big war ships have their red flags all ready to hoist to the tune of the Internationale. If the NRA fails, there is bound to be Hell popping.”