Poppe

To the Editors of The Crimson:

In the March 24 issue of the Crimson, I read an article about the Russian Research Center's use of Soviet collaborators during World War II in the post-war period. A distinguished scholar of Mongolian was prominently mentioned and I thought I should add my personal experiences to that story.

In the fall of 1946 when I was studying at the School for Oriental Studies in the University of London I received a request from Prof. Karl Menges of Columbia asking me if I could help Nicholas Poppe who was hiding in the Ruhr to escape American and British attempts to repatriate him to the USSR. I went to the US Army headquarters service (still at the time the OSS or its successor) and in a jeep went north looking for Poppe whom we finally found in Rittergut (estate) called Boeckel, newar Duesseldorf. We gave him a code name `Pushkin' and then tried to obtain an academic post for him in the USA. He finally went to the University of Washington in Seattle.

I should like to point out that Poppe was a Baltic German, not a Russian, and very anti-Stalin. The statement that he helped the Nazis pinpoint Jewish centers in the parts of the USSR occupied by the Germans is odd since he did not even know where the "Jewish centers" were in his native city of Leningrad. He was not considered as an informant on Soviet affairs by various specialist on Mongolia and Mongolian. I have not read the book reported in the Crimson but it sounds somewhat sensational. Richard N. Frye   Aga Khan Professor of Iranian