Refugees

Most fortunate European refugee of the week was Prince Alexander Hohen-Lohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfuerst, a naturalized Pole of Austrian-German extraction who fled to Rumania last month with U. S. Ambassador to Poland Anthony J. Drexel Biddle Jr., Mrs. Biddle and her daughter by a previous marriage, Miss Peggy Schulze. In Paris, with U. S. Ambassador to France William Christian Bullitt acting as best man, the 21-year-old Prince married 18-year-old Peggy, whose mother is an $85,000,000 copper heiress.

No. 1 British refugee in Germany remained beauteous, Nazi-struck Hon. Unity Valkyrie Freeman-Mitford, sister-in-law of No. 1 British Fascist Sir Oswald Mosley. Soon after World War II began she took German citizenship by special dispensation of the Fuehrer, then contracted double pneumonia and last week was convalescent in Munich. "I am a very sad man," groaned her father, Lord Redesdale, in London recently. "The King's enemies are the enemies of every honest Englishman."

The Archduke Robert, 24, second son of the late Austrian Kaiser Karl, was sent from Belgium to Paris by his brother Archduke Otto, 26, the Habsburg Pretender, with an offer to recruit a full division of Austrian refugees and send them to fight on the Western Front if Britain and France will announce as one of their war aims "restoration of Austria as an inde pendent State." Already in France with a similar proposal was Austria's onetime Heimwehr troop leader and Vice Chancellor, Prince Ernst Ruediger von Starhemberg, onetime friend of Adolf Hitler, who recently ordered confiscated 13 castles in Austria belonging to the Prince.

Dr. Eduard Benes, who yielded the Sudetenland to Germany without a fight (TIME, Oct. 17, 1938), busied himself in Paris trying to get established a legal, provisional CzechoSlovak Government, told the Anglo-U. S. Press Club : "I believe that out of the turmoil of Europe will come a better society . . . a new moral and political renaissance, which naturally will take a very long time . . . will result in the restoration of Czecho-Slovakia." Last week, Dr. Benes broadcast from London, hoping to be heard by Czechs and Slovaks: "Today the retreat from the tyranny of Naziism is ended! Your place, (Czechoslovak citizen, is today in the front line. . . . The Allied aircraft will often appear over your towns* and will bring you encouragement and assistance. . . . Do not submit!" A Czech Legion of 1,000 to fight with the Allies was being enlisted in London last week by Jan Masaryk, son of Czecho-Slovakia's late great Founder-President Thomas Garrigue Masaryk. Son Masaryk, unlike Dr. Benes, does not believe in the re-creation of Czecho-Slovakiain the old sense but as a federation of Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia within a customs union. Asked why he was not carrying a gas mask in London, Son Masaryk cracked: "I used to carry one when I was a little boy, but I put it away years ago."

While Adolf Hitler's onetime great financial backer, Fritz Thyssen, was reported a refugee in Switzerland, his onetime nightly companion, piano-playing Dr. Ernst Franz Sedgwick ("Putzi") Hanfstaengl (Harvard '09), with whom the Fuehrer broke some years ago, was interned in England. "I am powerless to do anything to alter the situation," said his son Egon, a Harvard undergraduate. "I recognize the expediency of the move from the point of view of the British Government. It is disagreeable for the individual but otherwise perfectly justifiable."

The Misses Wanda and Jagoda Pilsudski, daughters of the late great Marshal, "The Father of Modern Poland," were trying last week to volunteer for hospital work in London, where their mother was busily house hunting. Simply brought up in Warsaw, they use neither powder nor lipstick, are now being shown the ropes of Mayfair by cosmopolitan Mrs. Josef Moscicki, daughter-in-law of Poland's refugee former President.

"Mme Pilsudski has sought shelter in England because she knows she will be allowed to live in strict retirement," said a Polish Embassy secretary. "In France it would have been more difficult for her to live without publicity. There are so many Poles in France who have wished to acclaim her." In strict retirement in Wales, too, was the Frau Dollfuss, refugee widow of the assassinated Chancellor, her whereabouts known only to three people.

*None had up to last week, so far as could be learned.

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