CENSORS OUTWITTED

Wairarapa Times-Age, 11 March 1940, Page 11

CENSORS OUTWITTED

j NEWS FROM GERMANY CLEVER DEVICES. REVELATIONS OF FORMER CORRESPONDENT. LONDON. January 6. ship on letters sent out of Germany, but important items of news still trickle through to the outside world, the writers often using the simplest devices to fool the censor. Some genuine examples were quoted in a London newspaper this week by Willi Frischauer, a former correspondent of a Vienna newspaper. When Hitler upset thousands of Baltic Germans by ordering them to return to the Reich, some of them invented ingenious devices to cheat the Nazi censor. One of the repatriated Balts, for instance, extremely unhappy in his new German home, wrote to his brother in Riga, Latvia: — “Everything is very nice here, but I suggest you postpone your departure for Germany until after Jan’s wedding.” Jan. the gir'l referred to in this letter, was only two years old. • Another repatriated Balt tried a similar method to convey to friends at home the true state of things in Nazi Germany. He wrote: — “We have not seen our old friend Mr Sviestas since we arrived." Sviestas is the Lettish word for butter. But the German censor did not know that. JUST A HOLIDAY. British newspaper correspondents some time ago tried to get through to their newspapers the news that one of the Nazi leaders was seriously ill: "He has been visited by six Harleystreet men,” they wired to London. The Nazi who was anxious not to let anything leak out about this illness, passed the message. He did not know enough about London to understand what “Harley-street” stands for in England. Last year Jewish families in Germany were constantly writing to friends abroad: "My poor husband /(or son or brother) has had to go on holiday. . .” It took their friends a long time to find out why the holiday makers were so unhappy. In the end they realised that the "holiday” was really a spell in a concentration camp. In one German area an ex-school-teacher was made a Nazi censor. People who wanted to send messages abroad knew his weakness for correcting spelling mistakes in every letter which passed through his hands. So the writers made a series of spelling mistakes in their letters, and believe it oi' not the school-teacher-censor concentrated so ■ much on correcting them he never bothered about the meaning of the messages. Much of my news from Germany, writes Willi Frischauer, used to be written in the hand of a six or seven-year-old boy. Censors never bother to read children’s letters.