New In; Old Out

In his elegant Paris law office young Count Rene de Chambrun, son of the French Ambassador to Italy, swiveled around last week to face a reporter. "Miss Elsa Sittell is very religious," said he. "She was once a choir singer in a Bronx Catholic church. She is very conscientious and it is her habit to say what she thinks. She is of a nervous temperament. "We are doing everything we can." continued Count Rene. "I have appealed to the French Foreign Office and to the American Ambassador."

Intending to surprise her German parents, whom she had not seen for eight years, Stenographer Sittell recently threw up her Manhattan job with the law firm of Davis, Polk, Wardwell, Gardiner & Reed where she had taken dictation from Count Rene when he worked in their office. Sailing for Paris, she got a job with Count Rene before proceeding to surprise her parents. Last week she arrived at Schoenberg, a tiny German customs depot on the Saar border and, as usual, said what she conscientiously thinks.

"To me your Hitler looks Jewish," observed the onetime Bronx choir singer to a German customs guard who was going through her baggage. "I don't think Hitler is a German anyway. His type is certainly not Teutonic--so what's the idea of his treating the Jews the way he does?"

According to the flabbergasted customs guard, "this woman then continued her slanderous tirade against the Realmleader. She said: 'Anyhow you can bet your life he's no Gentile!'"

To some Nazi Storm Troopers loitering in the station Miss Sittell was moved to say, "Those are awful uniforms you're wearing." The Storm Troopers summoned the lone policeman of Waldmohr, a village three miles distant. He charged Stenographer Sittell with "insulting the Realmleader," clapped her into the village jail. When correspondents arrived they found the village in a panic. Nobody would say anything except the policeman. "Now don't go writing any atrocity stories," he begged. "Fraeulein Sittell has plenty of food and all possible conveniences. Her dancing around merrily in her cell is the best proof that she is being well treated. No, you can't see her, but undoubtedly she is in good spirits."

"Filthy, obscene, contaminating, Also in good spirits as she landed in Manhattan to close a $1,000 contract to tell her story to the tabloid Daily News last week, was Miss Isobel Lillian Steele, the U. S. music student whom Nazis arrested and held for four months at Berlin, charging her with everything from Communism to espionage (TIME, Nov. 19).

Pushed as a visiting celebrity by her tabloid, the Nazi's victim was officially welcomed by Manhattan's Jewish Acting Mayor. Her picture was warmed over, day after day, by such stunts as having her photographed with Dancer Sally Rand. In effect she turned out to be the best pro-Nazi publicity stunt unconsciously produced in the U. S. thus far. By her own statement, Miss Steele tried to divert the Berlin police with drinks when they came to arrest her. She acted as their stool pigeon when they obliged her to entrap a friend by telephone. And she kept a diary in jail from which it appeared that she was fairly well treated. Most poignant was her grief when she found that her friendship with the Bareness von Biel, "one of the most sacred in my life," had ended in the Baroness' peaching, everything is filthy, obscene, contaminating," noted Diarist Steele.

Superb tabloid stuff, except that it lacked detail, would have been Miss Steele's rambling revelations concerning her acquaintance Baron Jurek Sosnowski, a reputed Polish spy. At his parties, according to the News's rewrite man. "Nazi secrets were blurted out by dazzled noblewomen courting the Baron's heart--and presto! the young American violinist was established in the minds of the secret police as a plotter of equal rank with Sosnowski."

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