Foreign News: Literary Consul

Tall, sandy-haired, handsome Walther Wilhelm August Ludwig Reinhardt, expert .golfer & tennis player, author of a prize-winning life of George Washington (in German), used to flutter U. S. feminine hearts as German consul in Chicago, Manhattan, Seattle. Last week he was still consul general in Liverpool, England, but the British Government, charging he helped a laborer sell Germans plans of Britain's big shell factory at Euxton, demanded his recall. Sore as hornets at recent expulsions of their inept agents, Nazis threatened reprisals against Britons in Germany if Consul Reinhardt had to go.

Literary kudos came to Author Reinhardt in 1932. While he was consul at Seattle, the Strassburger Foundation to further U. S.-German friendship awarded its $1,000 prize to his terse, lively, human, 367-page Washington biography, The Story of the Making of a Nation. In it Author Reinhardt compared General Washington to Field Marshal von Hindenburg, his all-time hero. Among the literary judges who picked the book were Scientist Albert Einstein, Authors Thomas Mann, Jacob Wassermann, Stefan Zweig. All are now dead or in exile.

A tall-story teller in conversation, Consul Reinhardt used to have breathless U. S. socialites bug-eyed as he described his escape from a Bolshevik prison. Jailed while assisting prisoners during the Russian Revolution, Consul Reinhardt day by day watched Chinese guards lead away some of his companions to be executed, waited for his own turn to come. It never did. Instead "a very beautiful young lady, wrapped in furs" guided Herr Reinhardt and cell mates to two waiting limousines, sped them to a hideout, kept them supplied with food. Later the Consul learned that his rescuer was a Jewish girl friend of late potent Bolshevik Grigory Zinoviev (né Radomyslsky, purged August 1936).

U. S. friends of Consul Reinhardt hint that at present he is being put on the spot by intriguing Nazis, who, they claim, do not like him, have sidetracked his diplomatic career.