The Waterbury Democrat., 1943-01-22
breaking a vocal cord over a J, or a Russian.
 ANTI AMERICAN CAMPAIGN SWEPT OVER GERMANY

SWEPT OVER GERMANY
 The anti-American campaign caught on quickly with the German people. The change in sentiment was so swift that by autumn, 1941, it had become perilous for an Amer ican to speak English on the streets of Berlin. I myself was ordered out of two restaurants in the Kurfuer- stendamm area for committing the crime of speaking my own language. A preposterous feature was that in one case, in the Tusculum restau- rant, I had addressed the walters in German but they had insisted on answering me in English, until the manager, on the suggestion of people At tables near mine, scolded them nnd told them to direct me to leave the premises immediately and, please, not to come back againl It was 8 fantastic incident. By the time I had paid my bill q insisted on paying; God knows why) men at the tables around mine were stand ing up and crying plain and fancy curses at me. My roommate, Jack Fleischer. came home one night bruised from having been beater Up on Wittenberg Platz by three German officers for addressing irI English a German girl we both knew in 8 restaurant near our place For the same crime, three members of the staff of the American En- bassy were set upon in Horcher's Berlin's best restaurant, by three Italian patrons and two German walters. One of the Americans suf- fered broken hand after flfteen- minute fight. but he did not dis cover 1t until all five of the enemy were on their backs cold and police men had been called into the restau- rant to arrest the victors They were, of course, released after they showed their diplomatic passports. Berlin had become a not very pleas ant assignment for Americans.
 When the pinch came to Nazism, American correspondents suffered at first more acutely than the few other Americans in Germany, due to the very nature of their vocation. They were the eyes and ears of the hated America inside Germany. What l3O 100000 Americans knew about contemporary Germany was bottle" necked through fifteen or twenty re- porters on the spot. They were cast in the egregious role of being spec tators who wrote and spoke what they saw in 8 country that was vir" tually at war with their own nation. The role was not a comfortable one, you may be sure.
 U. s. CORRESPONDENTS
 WATCHED CLOSELY
 Hotels requested American corre- Spondents to vacate their rooms. All our telephone conversations were obviously tapped, and our houses were watched by not very subtly disguised plain clothes detectives Anxious to prevent reports of what was happening in Berlin from reach- ing enemy ears, the propaganda ministry several times warned the American corps to mind its ways of reporting, for nisdemeanorS - and there was no fixed guide as to what was a. n1isdemearor and what conn., prehensive, conScientiously written dispatch - would be considered mil- itary and political espionage, and that we knew what the penalty for espionage was. It was a ttcklish situation; the whole resembled what people talk about when they refer to a Reign of Terror. That is not an exaggeration, it is quite serious. The Nazis were not fooling or mak- ing empty threats: they meant 1t.
 (COpyright. 1942. by Howard K. smith. Distributed by United Feature Syndicate, Incl
 TOMORROW: Last train from Der lin: crossing into Switzerland as bombs fall on Pearl Harbor.