Anything shabbier than the behaviour of the Ministry of Information
in the matter of its " butter for Goering " story—to which I have referred in its earlier stages—is difficult to imagine. The Ministry, it will be remembered, circulated to the British Press what has turned out to be a totally untrue account of how a Mr. Hentzen of Bradford had, until war broke out, been sending parcels of butter to various Nazi leaders, including Field Marshal Goering and Dr. Goebbels. Mr. Hentzen at once declared that the whole thing was a mare's nest, though he had, in fact, been sending butter to nine private persons in Germany, one of whom happened to bear the surname Goering. Here the matter might have been expected to end, with a final admission by the Ministry of its mistake, and, as a matter of course, an unreserved apology. Far from it. There was published on Saturday a letter written to Mr. Hentzen on behalf of the Minister of Information by the Assistant Treasury Solicitor, to the effect that the Minister " is now able to accept the explanation that the persons to whom the parcels of butter in question were sent, though probably all members of the Nazi Party [a com- pletely unwarranted assumption, obviously inserted to create prejudice] were friends or Civil Servants with whom Mr. Hentzen came into contact in the course of his business." A graceless refusal to admit mistake.
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