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Dubious Bets
Fritz Kuhn, ex-fiihrer of the German-American Bund, interned by the U.S. as an enemy alien since his parole from a two and a half-to-five-year prison sentence (for stealing Bund funds), was ordered deported to Germany. Naturalized in 1934, his citizenship was canceled in 1943 (he took the oath of allegiance "with mental reservations").
Knut Hamsun, 85, Nobel Prizewinning Norwegian novelist (Growth of the Soil, The Road Leads On) and pro-Nazi intellectual, was reported to have suffered a nervous breakdown upon learning of the German collapse. Once before the old man was made ill by wartime: a stroke overtook him in 1942 when countrymen who had once loved his books mailed him thousands of dog-eared copies after he advised them to "throw away your rifles. . . " The Germans are fighting for us and now are crushing England's tyranny over us and all neutrals."
The Cloudy Future
Sidney Hillman, agile chairman of the C.I.O.'s ambitious Political Action Committee, made the most circumspect, warily-worded political prediction of the week: the P.A.C. will be active in the 1948 presidential election—"an election that could give Harry Truman the Presidency for a second term."
Kirsten Flagstad, 49, whose famed Wagnerian ho-yo-to-hos have not resounded in the Metropolitan Opera since she joined her husband in Nazi-held Norway four years ago, planned to return to the U.S. "to see my daughter [by a previous marriage — Mrs. Elsa Dusenberry of Bozeman, Mont.] if not to sing." Flagstad managed to keep herself politically neutral by refusing to sing for Nazi audiences, but her wealthy quisling husband, Henry Johansen, was less successful: his one-week imprisonment in a Gestapo concentration camp last February was described by Norwegian patriots as a "face-saving maneuver," during which he lived in the camp commandant's quarters.
Heinrich Himmler, missing, bloody boss of the liquidated Gestapo, was no longer a matter of concern to Winston Churchill, who observed: "I expect he will turn up somewhere in this world or the next, and will be dealt with by appropriate local authorities."