Due Process of Law

In a Vienna rooming house, four years ago, an obscure German citizen named Wilhelm Kaiser died, unmourned by anyone except his landlady. That kindly soul, Frau Amalie Feix, had nursed Kaiser during his illness, had paid hospital and funeral bills. The only valuables he had left behind were three rings. These, Frau Feix thought, rightly belonged to her. She hoped to sell them to make up for her expenses. Frau Feix, however, ran smack up against the Big Four.

The Potsdam conferees had decided that German assets in Eastern Austria could be seized by Russia for reparations. For two years, the Deputies of the Big Four Foreign Ministers have been deadlocked on the question of precisely what constitutes German assets; the Russians, for example, include in their definition properties which the Nazis seized from the Austrians after the Anschluss. The Big Four might interminably haggle over half a billion dollars' worth of factories, oilfields and Danube River shipping, but all the competent authorities were agreed on one fact: Herr Kaiser's three rings seemed to be German assets, all right. Frau Feix was informed that she must not sell them without written permission from the Allied Commission for Austria.

In dire financial straits, Frau Feix got a lawyer to plead her case. Last week, deadlocked on practically everything else on the agenda, Austria's Big Four High Commissioners reached agreement on the case of the kindhearted landlady. They decided that Frau Feix might sell the three rings, keep the proceeds in payment for Samaritan services to her boarder.

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