Willke, Willcke, Willeke

Nazi hatchetmen kept hands off Presidential Candidate Wendell Willkie last summer, on the theory that any candidate with German blood would be a more agreeable President than the stubborn Dutch uncle in the White House who talks tough to their Fuehrer.

But Willkie.,since the election, has been talking like a Dutchman too. In Britain last month, just before he flew home to endorse the President's Lend-Lease Bill, Willkie broadcast a message to the German people (TIME, Feb. 17) affirming his opposition to everything that Hitler stands for. Said he: "I am of pure German descent. My family name is not Willkie but Willicke. My grandparents left Germany 90 years ago, and they did this in protest against tyranny, and in order to live as free people." When Nazis heard that, their patience, never very durable, wore thin and snapped.

In Berlin, one clear, cold morning last week, 43 newsmen, including four U. S. correspondents, reported by invitation at the Wilhelmplatz building of the Propaganda Ministry. They bundled into two enormous grey busses, set out on a five-hour trip to Aschersleben, home of Willkie's ancestors, in the Harz mountains 150 miles southwest of Berlin.

For Aschersleben's citizens it was a great occasion. Goblin-eared, stiff-collared Oberbuergermeister Dr. Bailer seized the opportunity to make a speech boosting Aschersleben during lunch: "Gentlemen of the world's press, hearty welcome. . . . Great honor. . . . Our wonderful city . . . population 34,000, doubled since 1938. . . ." Then they were herded down the street, to Holzmarktstrasse No. I, where Wendell Willkie's grandfather was born.

It was a steep-roofed, three-story house, with the front door opening on the street, an arched carriage entrance at the side. Over the door was a freshly painted sign: "Eggs, venison and fowl, Proprietor Elli Wagner." In the courtyard behind the house still stood the decaying shop, with moldering yellow bricks and sturdy, hand-hewn beams, where Grandfather Willkie, and his father before him, kept their coppersmithy.

The newsmen gaped, moved on to the City Hall. There, in a reception room decorated with jonquils and tulips, on a long oak table were spread calf-bound records, property deeds, Great-Grandfather Willkie's will. Their significance, according to Nazi spokesmen: they prove that Willkie is "a liar." Aschersleben's city archivist, Prussian-headed little Rector Goapka, launched into the story of his Willkie research. He made a big point of the four spellings of the name he found in church and city records: Willke, Willcke, Willeke, Willecke. "But," said he, "the name was never Willicke, as Herr Presidentschaftskandidat said." He grew impassioned, spluttered about blood and Jews, ended with an oratorical diatribe against International Jewry, into whose clutches he thought Wendell Willkie had fallen.

Gist of Archivist Goapka's findings: the Willkie family did not emigrate 90 years ago in search of freedom, after Germany's abortive Revolution of 1848, but ten years later, because a Jew named Gerson did them out of the coppersmithy.*

Archivist Goapka made much of the fact that Bernhard Gerson, who bought the smithy, paid nothing down, instead for 13 years paid Widow Willcke a monthly installment of 7 2/3 talers ($5.47).

Late in the afternoon, when they had been fortified with brandy, allowed to mull over the city records, and given photostatic copies of Goapka's exhibits, the newsmen climbed back into their busses, rumbled through the main street of Aschersleben, headed home. They passed two truckloads of French prisoners, watched a giant moon rise, said: "Ho-hum." In Berlin, Wendell Willkie's sister Charlotte, wife of a U. S. naval attache, Lieut. Commander Paul Pihl, said nothing.

*According to Willkie, they emigrated first in 1848, went back to Germany, returned to the U. S. for good around 1860.

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