It is hard for a journalist to admit that he didn’t know a story when he spent an evening with it. I had that experience, sad to say, because the story was no less than the imminent honeymoon of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.

On a July evening in 1939, my wife and I gave one of our frequent Saturday get-togethers—big on talk and drink, given our finances, less lavish on food. The guests were mostly newsmen and their spouses, and the talk mostly about where Hitler would strike next, weekends being high on his calendar for that activity. “The Fuhrer takes a country in the weekend,” it was being said, “while the English take a weekend in the country.”

Not long before the gathering, one of the guests, an old friend, called to ask whether he might bring along an acquaintance just in from Baltimore, with a chap in tow who likewise hoped to be included. The latter was a German, but, I was assured, a decent sort. “As long as he’s not a Nazi,” I said, “bring them both along. There’ll be enough beer to go round.”

The German, it turned out, was a baron—even more surprising, a Baron Münchhausen. Barons were scarce in an uptown Manhattan apartment house on Claremont Avenue—and especially in that Bohemian, mildy raffish company. He stood out, his title and courtly manner befitting the descendant of one who had, some two centuries before, made the Münchhausen name synonymous with tall tales told about impossible adventures.

As the evening wore on, the baron gradually took up a jocular defense of his government’s way with the lesser tribes of Europe. A favorite target were the Czechs, who were, thanks to the overpowering attentions of the Third Reich, a nation then much in the world news. When a Czech is still in the cradle, he explained, a violin and a beer mug are placed on either side of him. By noting which object first gets the babe’s attention, one can readily predict his future career—fiddler or town drunk.

The sally went over none too well, but the group was fairly high by then, and all too little was made of the baron’s Teutonic jest. As a staff member of The Nation, which had been long and constantly demanding that the world stand up to the brutal Reich, I had grown more and more wary of the baron and was inclined to break up the evening as soon as an opportunity presented itself. At the same time, I was alerted enough to probe him a bit further.

After another interval of hand-kissing charm on the part of the dubious guest of honor and a slightly dampened jollity around the room, the evening’s proceedings came to an unexpected climax. One of the