A Heavy Suitcase

U. S. correspondents in South America watch like hawks the movements of stout, well-fed Baron Edmund von Thermann. German Ambassador to Argentina. But last fortnight he gave them the slip. He suddenly turned up in Santiago, Chile. Even the Chilean Foreign Office was caught off base; it barely had time to get an official to the airport to greet the Ambassador. Baron von Thermann blandly explained that he was traveling unofficially, was on his way to the Chilean lake country for a vacation. He carried a very heavy suitcase.

Baron von Thermann went to the German Embassy to stay with Ambassador Baron Wilhelm Albrecht von Schoen. Soon two other German diplomats arrived: Minister to Peru Dr. Eduard Willy Noebel and Minister to Bolivia Dr. Ernst Wendler. Then Baron von Thermann left Santiago, carrying a suitcase many pounds lighter.

Last week, before 300 carefully chosen guests who included Chile's top-ranking Government and Army officials, Baron von Schoen showed the contents of Baron von Thermann's suitcase: the German Army film, Victory in the West.

Reasons why Chile had been the first country in the Western Hemisphere so to be honored were not hard to find. Chile is far from the U. S. It commands the strategic Strait of Magellan. It is an important source of copper and nitrates. It has South America's only Popular Front Government, with concomitant Rightist dissatisfaction. It contains South America's oldest, most firmly established German minority (in the southern lake country, where Baron von Thermann went on his vacation). And Chile's extreme Rightists think highly of Chile's fascist-minded onetime President General Carlos Ibanez del Campo, who now lives in restless exile in Mendoza, just over the Andes in Argentina. Baron von Thermann's plane stopped at Mendoza on his way to Santiago.

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