Word: valtin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Last week the most widely read author in the country faced the possibility of deportation proceedings. The charges against him would be the facts, which he swore to be true, that he had written in his book. The author: "Jan Valtin," whose autobiographical Out of the Night is the life and hard times of an ex-Communist spy who fell into the hands of the Gestapo. It is the season's literary hot cake...
Sleuths deduced, from his own account of a prison term he served in San Quentin in 1926, that Valtin's real name is Richard Julius Herman Krebs. He wrote that he left the jail "in the first days of December, 1929." The only man who fitted Valtin's description of himself and who left San Quentin at that time was Convict Krebs. Charges on which he could be deported were his admittedly illegal entrance, his former membership and activity in the Communist Party in Germany...
...Valtin-Krebs was living last week in New York with his girl-wife, 17-year-old Abigail Harris. Around the former German terrorist and Red agent swirled a storm of conjecture and argument: was his autobiography true or a hoax? Valtin-Krebs & friends said it was true; no respectable evidence has yet been produced to show that it was anything else. And if it was true, under present alien laws, he was liable to deportation back to the Germany whence he had fled...
From Attorney General Jackson came one ray of hope for Valtin-Krebs. Worrying over some 8,000 other deportable aliens, last week Mr. Jackson declared that alien legislation was no longer "realistic." Six thousands of his deportables, he said, could not be sent back "because of conditions beyond our control." Even subjecting a man to an ocean crossing involved a "sort of contingent sentence of death...
Jackson's recommendations: 1) deposit criminal aliens in jail; 2) parole those who are guilty of only technical infringements; 3) set up a board to examine all deportables. Under whichever category Valtin-Krebs might come, he would probably prefer prison in the U. S. to almost certain death in Nazi Germany...