DEATH OF FORMER GERMAN I.F. MINISTER Recalls an Injustice

The death in Munich of Dr. Georg von Dehn, formerly German Minister to the Irish Free State, has grieved many. especially those who know that this fine Catholic gentleman and diplomat suffered bitterly in his few years of retirement and, perhaps, died of a broken heart.
He was transferred on promotion from Dublin to Bucharest in, if I remember
rightly, 1933. Before he left. he paid a courtesy call on the Nuncio Apostolic, Mgr. Paschal Robinson, 0.F.M,, and he knelt to kiss the Nuncio's ring. A photograph of the Minister kneeling appeared in Irish newspapers.
A few weeks later, Von Dehn was summoned from Bucharest to Berlin and dismissed the Service ignominiously. What was his offence? He had knelt to an archbishop. Germany's rulers considered this act of a faithful Catholic an indignity to Germany. A friend of Von Dehn's who visited him in his retirement in Germany last year, writes:
" When I visited him in Munich last year I was shocked to see that he had aged considerably, that he had lost much of that gaiety of spirit which had endeared him to his Irish friends, and that, in short, he seemed a broken man. He spoke to me longingly of Dublin. where, he said. he had spent his happiest years, but when I invited him to come over and spend a holiday with me he shook his head sadly and said: 'No, old friend; I don't think I could do that just yet.' "