Three to Moscow

Ominous indeed was the scene at the famed Reichstag Fire Trial when No. 2 Nazi Goring lost his temper and roared at Defendant George Dimitroff: "You'll be sorry yet if I catch you when you get out of prison, you scoundrel!" (TIME, Nov. 13). By a long coincidence it was the dawn of the first anniversary of the Fire last week when Nazi jailers unlocked the underground vaults where still lay three defendants at that trial, all acquitted, all Bulgarians, all Communists: Dimitroff, Wassil Taneff and Blagoi Popoff. (The fourth defendant, Marinus van der Lubbe, was convicted and beheaded.) In haste and secrecy the three were hustled to a plane at Berlin's Tempelhof Field. In two long hops they were out of Nazi Germany and Goering's reach and into Communist Moscow arid the midst of a cheering mob, speechmaking officials and holiday rockets.

Real reason for the release of Dimitroff, Taneff and Popoff was dug out by New York Times Correspondent Walter Duranty.* Last month OGPU arrested seven members of the Controll Co. for military espionage. Four of them were Germans and it seemed that the Soviet had definite evidence against them over a long period. Chancellor Hitler was glad to buy his Germans back with whatever he had that the Russians wanted.

*Correspondent Duranty leaves his Moscow job about April 1, to rove for the Times wherever he chooses for as long as he chooses. Fourteen years of alert, thoroughgoing work in Russia have made him the Times' most valuable foreign correspondent, but hard Muscovite winters and office routine have frayed his nerves, pained his footless leg. His successor will be able Harold Norman Dennv, longtime TIME man.

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