Word: congers
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...this gossip the Berlin radio retorted specifically, invited skeptics to telephone Willy Messerschmitt at his Augsburg home. One reporter who did so was Beach Conger, correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, whom the Nazis squeezed out of Berlin last fortnight because he would not retract a dispatch picturing Adolf Hitler and his High Command at odds about invading The Netherlands. Mr. Conger and a British reporter named Geoffrey Cox telephoned Willy Messerschmitt from Amsterdam. The man who answered insisted he was the famed planemaker. "I haven't been out of Germany since the war started," he said...
Next day, when correspondents gathered in the Propaganda Ministry for their regular morning conference, there was hell to pay. Blond, youthful Dr. Karl Bomer, head of the press department, grimly read passages from Newsman Conger's dispatch, exclaiming: "Lies! . . . Scoundrelly reporting! ... False to the last syllable!" Added another propaganda official: "It's worse than a lost battle...
Deprived of his right to attend press meetings or send dispatches, because of this "violation of the hospitality of the Reich," Newsman Conger was effectively silenced. Stern Dr. Bomer offered to restore his privileges if the Herald Tribune would print a retraction. But it was unthinkable that the Herald Tribune would take orders from Berlin, repudiate what its own correspondent had written. Said Managing Editor Grafton Wilcox in Manhattan: "If there is an official German denial, we'll print that." There was no German denial...
Thus ended, six weeks after it began, Beach Conger's brief career as a Berlin bureau chief. Born in Berlin, he is the son of a foreign correspondent: the late Seymour Beach Conger Sr. spent 13 years in Russia and Germany for Associated Press, was attached to the German Army during World War I. Young Conger was graduated from the University of Michigan in 1932, went twice around the world, then joined the Herald Tribune staff two years...
When Joseph Barnes gave up his job in Berlin and went home for a rest (weary of constant Nazi threats to muzzle him), Herald Tribune editors debated long over Beach Conger's youth and inexperience, finally gave him Barnes's place. Blond, meticulous, with close-cropped hair and thick-lensed spectacles, Conger looks like a respectable German official. Within two hours after his arrival in Berlin he had telephoned more people than Joseph Barnes knew. Most of them were young Nazis who had once been his schoolmates...