Net Netted

Into the Grand Jury Room in Federal Court in Manhattan last week a puffing G-man lugged a large chart, showing the operations of the spy net which G-men and U. S. Attorney Lamar Hardy have been trying to net since February (TIME, May 30). The hunt began when an American Army deserter of Austrian parentage, brush-headed Guenther Gustave Rumrich, was arrested in a clumsy attempt to steal passport blanks. He promptly implicated several German-Americans in attempts to steal Army aircraft designs and military secrets. Five days after looking at the chart, the Grand Jury returned indictments in the most serious charges of espionage ever made by the U. S. against a friendly power.

"The directing heads of this ring," dryly observed Attorney Hardy, "reside in Germany and are connected with the Government of that country. [They] paid these agents in the U. S., all of whom were of German extraction, various sums of money for furnishing certain information concerning our national defense. . . ."

Of 18 alleged spies named in the indictments, 14, including a key witness named Dr. Ignatz Griebl, are believed to have left the U. S. Two, Lieut. Commander Udo von Bruen, and Lieut. Commander Hermann Menzel are minor officials of the German War Ministry. In captivity awaiting trial are only four: Otto Hermann Voss, a onetime employe in the experimental section of Seversky Aircraft Corp. at Farmingdale, L. I., charged with shipping information on U. S. Army planes to Germany; Guenther Rumrich; a U. S. Army private named Erich Glaser; red-headed Johanna Hofmann, a hairdresser on the German liner Europa and messenger of the ring, charged with transmitting to their employers the secret code used by Army planes in communicating with their stations. Since the U. S., unlike Germany, does not punish espionage by death in peacetime, stiffest sentence the spies faced on any count was 20 years imprisonment.

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