GERMANY: Himmler's Thriller

Last week Chief of German Police Heinrich Himmler was proud as a pouter pigeon. Having proved strangely inept as a cop, he redeemed himself as a superb detective-story author. Serially, from day to day, he released his mystery thriller, The Bürgerbräu Plot:

Chapter 1: The Wireless Set. Late in October 1939, clever Gestapo agents, posing as discontented Germans, managed to make contact with certain naïve British intelligence officers in The Hague. The British got to like their "friendly opponents," and soon gave them a transmitting and receiving apparatus containing three American steel tubes; and a secret code. The set was not so good; had to have some German parts put in. The Germans carried it back into Germany, and the Britons at once began sending in the closest secrets of their Government.

Chapter 2: The Dastardly Plot. On the night of November 8, at 9:21 p.m., just eleven minutes after Adolf Hitler left the Bürgerbräu Keller in Munich, a bomb exploded, killing eight, injuring 62, just missing the little man who wasn't there.

Chapter 3: At the Border. Next day a big limousine drew up near a little inn on the German-Dutch border at Venloo. At the wheel was a certain Dutchman named J. Lemmens, posing as a chauffeur. In back was a blond, immaculate Englishman named Sigismund Payne Best, amateur musician, husband of a famous Dutch society painter, Mariettje van Rees, something of a getabout in Dutch circles; owner of a large house mysteriously close to the Royal Palace. With him was dark-haired Captain Richard Henry Stevens, well known as the head of the British Secret Service on the Continent. These two were posing as peace mediators. With them was a certain Dutch Army officer named Lieut. Klop, posing as a friend.

As the car pulled to a stop, a German in civilian clothes stepped out of the cafe and made a mysterious signal. At once a gang of civilians rushed across the border from Germany, firing wild shots (one of which killed Mynheer Klop). The civilians bundled their captives into another car, and drove across the border. Secret Agents Stevens and Best were arrested.

Chapter 4: Swiss Tryst. Hanging around in Switzerland, meanwhile, waiting to greet the Tool of the Plot, was a 42-year-old man, fatter now than he was in the days when he was one of Adolf Hitler's stanchest standbys, a man so severely wounded in 1914-18 that he must still lead an ascetic life—Dr. Otto Strasser, head of the Black Front, sworn to demolish Hitler. He had obviously planned the bombing.

Chapter 5: Another Border Incident. George Elser, 36, posing as a master mechanic from Württemberg, walked up to a point 15 yards from the Swiss border, where, when confronted by Nazi guards, he said he was looking for a Swiss friend. He had about his person a perfectly valid passport, but also 15 sketches and maps of munitions depots and factories, as well as statistics of munitions deliveries, parts of gun mechanisms, and a postcard of Bürgerbräu Keller. He said he wanted to send the postcard to his father. He was arrested.