The name Hornbostel caught my eye at once when I
saw it in a Vienna telegram in the Manchester Guardian on Tuesday, for I have memories of a very pleasant meeting with Herr Hornbostel at lunch at the British Legation at Vienna a year or two before the war, when he was Permanent Secretary at the Austrian Foreign Office. Since then he has spent several years in a concentration camp, and I was very glad to hear the other day that it had left no grave effects on him. The latest mention of him is in connection with an interesting story. He has been giving evidence at the trial of Schmidt, the former Austrian Foreign Secretary, on a charge of treason, and told how he, Schmidt and Sir Robert (now Lord) Vansittart had had a confidential talk on Italy at a private dinner near Geneva in 1936 and how some time later Signor Panfuso, Chef de Cabinet to Count Ciano, then Italian Foreign Minister, showed Schmidt a photostatic copy of a private memorandum Van- sittart had made of the conversation. How did the Italians get that?
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