A Famous War Waif Goes to Bat for New Generation

Actress Audrey Hepburn, appealing for help for the world’s poor children, told a congressional subcommittee that as a child in Belgium she had been “one of those children of war-ravaged Europe to receive help from UNICEF.” Hepburn, now a volunteer for the United Nations’ Children’s Fund, said children were among the hardest-hit victims of the Third World debt crisis. “Children are too fragile to wait until the economic crisis is past,” the Academy Award-winning actress told the House Appropriations subcommittee. Hepburn said the debt crisis is hurting children rather than the military and other interests, a situation she called “an outrage against a large section of humanity.”

--A former guard at Spandau Prison was given a one-year suspended jail term for stealing a flying uniform, dentures and other possessions belonging to the late Nazi war criminal Rudolf Hess and then trying to sell them to Hess’ son. Stephen Timson, 33, of Britain, maintained he “found” the items stashed in a garbage bag in a prison storage room. He and his brother-in-law, Paul Warman, 24, were arrested in a Hamburg hotel last December when they met with Hess’ son, Wolf Ruediger Hess, and demanded the equivalent of $267,000 in return for the items. Warman was fined $1,200 for helping Timson. Rudolf Hess, former deputy to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, died on Aug. 17, 1987, at the age of 93 after serving the last 21 years of his life sentence as the sole inmate at Spandau, the Allies’ prison in West Berlin. His death was ruled a suicide.

--There was no happy ending to the fairy tale that began last summer when Richard Hemmelsbach was adopted by a childless West German baron. On Wednesday, Hemmelsbach missed a bank’s deadline for coming up with $3 million to keep the baron’s 1,429-year-old castle in the family. The bank that has a lien on the 150-room castle and 970-acre estate on the Mosel River in southwestern West Germany plans to put the property up for sale. As the adopted son of Baron Theodore von Liebieg, Hemmelsbach, of Ferrysburg, Mich., stood to inherit the estate, whose estimated value is $10 million. Von Liebieg, 76, selected the 57-year-old Hemmelsbach, in part because of his German heritage, from more than 10,000 people worldwide who responded to the baron’s televised plea for an heir on the syndicated show “A Current Affair.” Despite the setback, Hemmelsbach was upbeat. “I still have this wonderful birthright and a wonderful father and I plan to be a good baron and good son,” he said. “I think we’re all disappointed, but the baron has never asked about the castle. He only wants to know when I am coming back to visit.”