GERMANY: Orloff Case

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In 1924 Ramsay MacDonald, Prime Minister of Britain's impotent minority Labor Government, reopened diplomatic relations with the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. Within a few months the Labor Government was defeated on its Russian policy, a general election was called. At the height of a bitter campaign Lord Northcliffe's Daily Mail printed in noble indignation a letter apparently from Grigory Evseevich Zinoviev, "Bomb boy of Bolshevism," onetime director of the Third International, urging British Communists to revolt, Communist sympathizers in the British Army and Navy to mutiny. As a result the election went overwhelmingly Conservative. Soviet officials denied the Zinoviev letter, British Laborites insisted it was a forgery. Little could be proved.

Last winter to Hubert R.Knickerbocker, Berlin correspondent of New York's Evening Post, appeared one Vladimir Orloff, bald, vandyke-bearded, onetime Councillor of State in the Imperial Russian Government. Mephistophelian M. Orloff had in his possession letters elaborately typed on official Soviet notepaper purporting to show that U. S. Senators William Edgar Borah and George William Norris had accepted $100,000 bribes from Soviet agents.

Correspondent Knickerbocker, unimpressed, went to the Berlin military police with his story. Very quickly it was proved that the Borah letters were forgeries, that bald M. Orloff himself had forged them. Imperial Orloff, whose secret traffickings enabled him to own two houses in Berlin and a country place on the Elbe, was hastily jailed to await trial; jailed with him was Michael Pavlovsky, his "errand boy." Rumors were insistent that not only the Borah letters but the more important Zinoviev letter were the work of Orloff.

Fortnight ago the Orloff trial, long awaited, commenced. Startling was the testimony of Harold Siewert, head of the detective agency which is complainant against the defendants.

"I have been told," said he, "that Orloff and Pavlovsky frequently boasted that they were the authors of the Zinoviev letter."

"Who told you this?" demanded Defense Attorney Walter Jaffe.

"Nuntia!" answered Detective Siewert bluntly.

Consternation! Nuntia is the popular name for Germany's most secret, most unmentionable police organization. It is as unmentionable as Russia's famed Cheka. The embarrassed judge hastily dismissed the witness, adjourned court for three days.