After four months in Nazi prison camps, two U.S. foreign correspondents last week got their voices back. The two prisoners were Jay Allen, 41-year-old, Seattle-born veteran foreign correspondent (NANA) and 24-year-old, Brooklyn-born U.P. Correspondent Richard Hottelet, who steamed into New York Harbor aboard the U.S. transport West Point. Some of their experiences:
Richard Hottelet, arrested March 15 by Berlin Gestapo agents on charges of spying for an "enemy power," was tossed into a tiny, grim cell in Alexanderplatz prison, deprived of even his eyeglasses "to prevent suicide," left strictly alone for three days—"the hardest and longest I ever spent." Thereafter grilled relentlessly, he was threatened but never tortured with "the brutal methods of the American police." Fed black bread, ersatz coffee, sour gruel and margarine, he was refused books and newspapers, exercised in goose step half an hour a week, received one bath in seven weeks. Shortly before his transfer to grimmer, notorious Moabit prison, a Gestapo man told him: "You will sit until you confess. You will soften up. You'll be soft as butter."
Only twice was young Hottelet allowed to see a U.S. official and then not allowed to discuss his "case." He was released July 8 with neither forewarning nor explanation.
Jay Allen was arrested March 13 while snooping in Occupied France. He was sentenced to four months instead of the customary two weeks to a month, and put in an ancient military prison at Chalon-sur-Saone. Though in Vichy he had been given special facilities, talked with Weygand and Pétain, circulated freely as far as North Africa, the Vichy Government, to show the Nazis he was no friend of theirs, now also put out a warrant for his arrest, on grounds of stealing documents "affecting the security of the French State." (They were really photostat copies of police reports on De Gaullist and Cormmunist activities in France, for which he had paid a young Hungarian journalist, now in a Vichy clink, about $12.)
Though allowed to buy food, chubby Correspondent Allen lost 38 Ib. — for the first time in ten years his ribs showed faintly. He was also put through a farcical examination by an SS man from Paris, who accused him of being an agent of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin. His diary was taken away on the last day. When he pointed out that it contained only the Nazi propaganda effusions, he was told gloomily that they considered it "too late" for propaganda in the U.S.
His last three weeks were spent in a Dijon military prison, a really tough stretch of solitary confinement, with 15 minutes a day in a tiny courtyard, no talking or smoking. But the joke was, concluded Allen, rather on the Germans than himself. In jail he talked to prisoners from Occupied France, Belgium and Holland, politicians, priests, officers, newspapermen, German deserters, an aristocrat or two, who told him much more about Occupied France than he ever could have got outside.