Perversion
Sirs:
TIME'S cover of Dec. 23, 1940 was so good that it is being used in the Argentine as German propaganda, with slight alterations, however. Niemöller's face has been changed to that of F. von Bodelschwingh, and the swastika on the original has been replaced with the British flag.
LIVINGSTON BUNZL
Buenos Aires, Argentina
> Profanely ironic is the choice of Bishop Friedrich Franz Ernest von Bodelschwingh for the Nazi-perverted steal of TIME'S Niemöller cover. Called the "poor man's bishop," gentle, patriarchal, immensely popular Bishop von Bodelschwingh defied Hitler in June 1933, resigned as Reich Bishop of the German Evangelical Church one month after taking office. Refusing high office in the church's home missions, he helped organize (with Niemöller) the militant anti-Nazi Pastors' Emergency Federation.
Still head of Bodelschwingh Institute at Bethel (founded by his father), he last year defied Hitler's order to release several thousand defectives from that charitable institution. His reason: belief that they would be killed according to Nazi euthanasia theory. Nonetheless the Nazis tried to make capital of him in South America by a drawing (see cut] showing a British bomb hitting the Institute.
Herewith also is the TIME cover (accurately reproduced but without permission) and printed with a Spanish translation of TIME'S Niemöller story by Buenos Aires' pro-British magazine Desfile. The British Embassy distributed 25,000 copies of this reprint in Argentina, ordered 250,000 more for all South America.—ED.
Not Responsible
Sirs:
Your scoop on the story appearing in TIME, Aug. 18, telling of the appointment of Judge Rosenman as official clean-up man for the defense-program tangle was most interesting.
Did you, however, expect people to read between the lines of your statement, and catching the words: "gave him orders large and new, fit for the deed he had to do," supply the balance of Humpty Dumpty's poem:
"I told them once, I told them twice, they would not listenl to advice?" . . .
MARJORIE S. COLEMAN
New York City
> Between lines, let Reader Coleman proceed strictly at her own risk.—ED.
"Tell him . . ."
Sirs:
. . . I am enclosing copy of a letter . . . from a young friend who is with the Free French Army of De Gaulle. I came to know his father well when I was in the Judge Advocate's Department in the A.E.F. during the last war, and our families have since kept up relations. . . .
ARTHUR D. HILL
Boston, Mass.
[Herewith translated excerpts—ED.]
My dear friend:
. . . Until now it has been difficult for me to tell you just what I have been doing in General de Gaulle's Legion, but now I can do so. . . .
I have been taking an infantry course which will continue for about three months. So I have had . . . to leave the tank company to which I belonged, and which I liked tremendously. . . . I hope to rejoin it in three months with a section of sharpshooters. . . .