Roses for Kasha

Kasha liked Berlin. Among the neighbors in suburban Dahlem's quiet Herrfurthstrasse, the personable little Airedale puppy soon made herself as popular as her mistress, pretty OMGUS Stenographer Betty Six. In normal times even Locksmith Walter Tietz might have petted the dog as she sniffed at the door of his shop in the Ladenbergstrasse.

But, like many another Berliner, 52-year-old Walter was hungry. So were his wife, his bedridden mother and his 4 1/2-year-old son. When plump little Kasha came trotting by one day, Walter decided to bash her on the head with a crowbar. When Betty's German gardener found Kasha's body in the back of Walter's shop, he notified the MPs. Kasha died without going to the stewpot, but Walter landed in jail nonetheless. Ten days later a military court found him guilty and sentenced him to one month in prison. But the court's president, young ex-Lieut. Fred Tappan, promptly suspended sentence. "I am not going to send a hungry man to jail for killing a dog," he said.

Betty was irate. She told her boss, who told his boss. Soon the case reached the ears of Major General F. A. Keating, Commander of U.S. Forces in Berlin, who told his deputy, dog-loving Colonel Frank L. Howley, to, investigate. The military court's order was reversed, and young Judge Tappan censured. As Locksmith Tietz was dragged off to jail again, his bewildered wife, with a large bunch of roses clutched in one hand and her small son gripped by the other, called on Miss Six. Betty took the flowers uncertainly, stammered through an interpreter that, really, she had had nothing to do with Tietz's rearrest.

Last week the Army prepared to resentence Walter for several months. "The rate at which these Germans are killing U.S. dogs is almost an open measure of defiance," said one officer. But Mrs. Tietz was philosophical. "One lives somehow," she said. As for Betty--she already had a new dog, a Scotty. "You know," she told reporters last week, "when you're so far away from home, you get awful lonely, and a dog just changes everything. Now I feel right at home and happy again."

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