"Herren Censoren"

When the British first set up their wartime censorship apparatus, Lord Macmillan, Chief of the Ministry of Information, told correspondents that the censors had been instructed to delete or kill from their dispatches only information of a military nature. Matters political would not be touched. Last week tall, lanky Claud Cockburn, clever and daring editor of London's famed newsheet The Week, who because of his close Communist associations has pulled many a sensational political news beat, cabled to The Week's U. S. edition, now mimeographed in Manhattan, that the "Herren Censoren," as he called the British copy-passers, had cracked down on two of his high-powered, nonmilitary, highly political pieces. For some reason known only to the censors, Claud Cockburn's cable naming the stories he had been unable to send was passed uncensored.

One originally censored "inside" story declared that Nazi Exile Otto Strasser was plotting a German revolution in Paris. The other covered a "very interesting development" between a "British political party" (obviously the Conservative) and one of a "small neutral country of northeastern

Europe" (presumably Finland). Editor Cockburn, also on the staff of London's Communist newsorgan the Daily Worker, tried to suggest, even as the Kremlin's propagandists have in Moscow, that Finland was aided and abetted by Great Britain in her "aggressions" against the Soviet Union.

Latest Cockburn revelation is a story about Britain's wooing of Italy. According to him, Benito Mussolini wants, along with big territorial items, $360,000,000 in cash for joining the Allies. This story was cut by British censors in its transmission to the U. S. Not tampered with at all was a widely publicized (and not particularly Cockburn) version of the attempted Hitler assassination, which ended with the conclusion that the assassins were "near-Goering bomb layers"--i.e., accomplices of Field Marshal Hermann Goring, successor to the Fuehrer.

Also annoyed at the British censorship last week, chiefly for not matching the Nazis in supplying good war photos, was the British weekly magazine Picture Post. In the Nov. 4 issue the magazine shows a blacked-out countryside with a sign hung in the foreground: This is a private war. The War Office, the Admiralty, the Air Ministry and the Ministry of Information are engaged in a war with the Nazis. They are on no account to be disturbed. Nothing is to be photographed. No one is to come near.

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