The Raised Forefinger

As the U.S. Military Government's newspaper in Germany, Munich's daily Die Neue Zeitung is supposed to speak with a U.S. accent (TIME, Nov. 29). Last week anti-Nazi Germans thought Die Neue Zeitung was speaking in the same guttural nationalist accents that General Lucius D. Clay has been inveighing against recently. Said the U.S.-licensed Frankfurter Rundschau: "Certain [Germans] smile when they read Die Neue Zeitung, as they can find there everything they think and do not dare to say . . . Whether they read the column called 'Observer' or the letterbox 'The Free Word' they will always find a sarcastic criticism of the American occupation or the Anglo-American occupation policy . . ."

The Main Echo, at Aschaffenburg, went even farther. It accused Die Neue Zeitung of hiring a "publicist of the onetime Goebbels organ, the Reich [and] other National Socialist publicists" for its staff.

Die Neue Zeitung's new editor, Kendall Foss, who had taken over in mid-November, was stung by the slaps. In his own defense, he told the New York Times that his paper was "attempting within the American tradition . . . to report what is being said and whispered in Germany . . . even if that includes views other than the official American viewpoint."

At week's end the Military Government slapped Editor Foss down. It apparently saw no reason for a free press in the "American tradition" in a country that had no such tradition and was not free. An investigation of Die Neue Zeitung's policies and staffers was ordered. General Clay, visiting in Frankfurt, was told that Foss had said the paper had been "too much of a lecturer with a raised forefinger," but was now to be regarded "as a forum." Snapped Clay: "It was never the former, and it is not going to be the latter." He ordered Foss to stick to the directives that set it up as the Military Government's official paper.

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