The announcement on Saturday that Wintergrin would hold a full-scale press conference in Bonn on Tuesday at eleven created a rendezvous on the international calendar. All Monday the television crews were at work. Finally Kurt Grossmann announced that facilities would need to be pooled and a drawing was held to decide whose cameras would be permitted into the 150-seat chamber, admission to which had been solicited on behalf of three hundred reporters, cameramen, and photographers. That morning, Die Welt had said editorially that Count Wintergrin’s answers to the myriad questions, personal as well as political, would influence many voters still on the fence. “A people have the right to know their leaders. Some of the questions that will be put to Count Wintergrin are concededly extrapolitical, but the fate of Germany is a total concern. We need to know not only the policies of our leaders but something about their habits, their morals. The country is entitled to ask, and weigh the answers to, any question that might throw a light on the character of a man who seeks to guide that nation toward what some see as perdition, others as the first step toward a reunified republic.”
