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Diplomacy. Middle of the week the German Government and the Italian Government stood shoulder to shoulder in replying to Anglo-French notes proposing that further arrivals in Spain of non-Spanish warriors be halted. In the involved language of diplomacy Der Führer and Il Duce professed themselves ready to assist in halting the influx of warriors, on condition that those already in Spain, together with foreign agitators and other foreign aid all be cleared out. Nazi newsorgans roared that "the Red agents of Moscow" must not be permitted to remain in Spain, and raised the issue of the Bank of Spain's great gold hoard, now seized and in large measure cached abroad in bank accounts of members of Spain's Red Cabinet. Berlin and Rome thought something should be done about that. Neutral diplomats thought Der Führer and Il Duce, by the conditions they laid down, were simply throwing the whole issue of intervention in Spain back into the hands of London's luckless 27-nation Non-intervention Committee.
Spain's War. Madrid dispatches insisted that the German envoy to the Spanish White Government at Burgos, General Wilhelm Faupel, is in fact the military commander of the German expeditionary force in Spain. Last week Madrid credited him with sending his Reichswehr troops crashing into the Spanish Red Militia a few miles from Madrid and breaking through the Red front on the El Escorial road.
At Madrid, whether or not the Whites had taken Jan. 15 as their deadline for victory, the heaviest fighting of the entire civil war was going great guns this week, with German air bombs and projectiles pounding the $4,000,000 U. S.-owned Telephone Building into increasing uselessness. At latest reports U. S. Telephone Tycoon Colonel Sosthenes Behn was still with his battered building, although the U. S. and British embassies had long since been officially evacuated, and last week were scarred by air bomb splinters. Splinters lodged in the heads of a left-behind British military attache and an Englishwoman but neither was seriously hurt.
Baron Bumped Off. Dead, apparently shot in the back by a Red Militia execution squad, was Baron Jacques de Borchgrave, First Secretary of the Belgian Legation in Madrid. Incensed at Brussels, the Government of His Majesty King Leopold III demanded $35,000 indemnity from Spanish Premier Largo Caballero, plus a Spanish apology and full military honors for the Baron. His corpse was dug up and the Baron de Borchgrave was found to have been killed by a pistol shot just behind the ear in the classic style of "Spanish bumping off parties" (TIME, Jan. 11) and Chinese executions (see p. 22).