The Press: No. I

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When the 8,500-ton German freighter Hermod docked at Baltimore last week, a mustached newsman who looks more like a diplomat than a reporter was on hand to greet captain & crew in impeccable German. The one-man reception committee for the first German ship to visit the U.S^ since 1941 was Detlev Friedrich Achaz, Reichsgraf und Graf von der Schulenburg, 40, a newcomer to the U.S. himself. He is the first fully accredited German correspondent in the U.S. since Pearl Harbor. Reporter Schulenburg, already "Schuley" to fellow correspondents, is stationed in Washington and represents Deutsche Press Agentur, biggest news agency (500 papers) in Western Germany.

For energetic Schuley, it was a characteristically busy week. Besides the Hermod's arrival, Reporter Schulenburg covered a dozen stories with "local angles," e.g., the Senate debate on dismantling German plants, and went to six parties and several private dinners. A debonair addition to the capital's diplomatic and social salons but no mere cocktail correspondent, Schuley has filed 200 stories to D.P.A. since he landed in New York five months ago.

In Washington he usually attends Secretary of State Dean Acheson's press conferences, has not yet got his White House pass. Schuley, who belongs to no political party himself, says he strives for "neutral and fair" reporting in the "objective" manner of U.S. wire services, eschews punditing. So far, he has avoided painting word-portraits of controversial U.S. personalities because he is "against quick judgments."

Though a newcomer to the U.S., Schuley is an old hand at U.S.-style journalism. In Berlin in the '30s, he worked for topflight foreign correspondents. But the Nazis blamed Schuley for feeding "undesirable news" to the outside world, arrested him and later "retired" him to hunting rabbits on his family's 3,000-acre estate near Magdeburg, now in Russian hands.

Though the Nazis stamped him as "politically unreliable,"* Schuley served in the German air force as a captain, survived a bombing that cost him his left eye, was captured in 1945 and spent nearly four years in Russian prison camps and hospitals.

Schuley is still a little baffled by the fact that Americans ask him few questions about the Hitler days, a lot about Russian prison camps. Says he: "I do not know whether this is [because] some people may suspect that I was in the Nazi movement and are afraid of hurting my feelings, or whether there is simply no longer an interest in the U.S. on that subject."