Departures of note

Donald Satterlee Day, an American journalist who spent two decades reporting from Eastern Europe for the Chicago Tribune, ended his career broadcasting Nazi propaganda from Berlin during World War II. In the summer of 1944, convinced that Nazi Germany was the West's only bulwark against Soviet tyranny, Day moved to Berlin and became a commentator for the German State Radio. From August 31, 1944, until April 18, 1945, he broadcast to U.S. forces in Europe, denouncing President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the U.S. alliance with the Soviet Union, and blaming Jews for Soviet atheistic Communism. He was paid $3,000 a month, making him one of the six highest-paid employees on the station's payroll.

Born in Brooklyn in 1895, Day followed his father, editor of the New York Morning Telegraph, into journalism. After serving in U.S. naval aviation during World War I, he returned to New York and worked as a sports reporter. In 1921, he accompanied the unofficial Soviet representative Ludwig Martens on his deportation to the Soviet Union and, upon arriving in Riga, Latvia, accepted an offer from the Chicago Tribune's European director, Floyd Gibbons, to become the paper's Northern Europe correspondent. From August 1921, he was the only U.S. reporter in the region, covering the Baltic States, Finland, and the Soviet Union. His Soviet visa was revoked when he refused to report favorably on the Soviet system, and he relied instead on refugees and correspondents he sent across the border. His experiences made him a committed anti-Communist, and his reports on forced collectivization and the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 were almost unique among Western journalists at the time.

Day's anti-Communist stance shaped his later career. In March 1939, Polish authorities barred him from verifying reports of persecution of the country's ethnic German minority, as he was sympathetic to the German position. He covered the Winter War as a war correspondent, and when the Soviets invaded Latvia in June 1940, he was given 24 hours to leave. He claimed the invasion was facilitated by Russian and Jewish minorities, saying that at the railway station in Riga, the speeches and shouts were all in Russian or Yiddish. After the annexation of the Baltic States, he relocated to Sweden as the Tribune's Stockholm correspondent. In 1941, he accompanied Finnish troops advancing into Soviet territory, and in September 1942 he quit his post to join the Finnish Army. The Tribune demanded his return, and the Finns rejected his enlistment under pressure from the U.S. government. With his passport expired and unrenewed, he found himself unemployed and unable to travel freely.

After the Allied victory in Europe, Day was arrested by U.S. occupation forces in May 1945 and detained at Camp King, Oberursel, along with other Nazi broadcasters, until his conditional release in December 1946. He was rearrested pending treason charges in January 1949, but the U.S. Department of Justice dropped the case soon after, due to other agencies seeking Day's help to identify potential Soviet espionage agents who had entered the United States. A DOJ memorandum noted that his broadcasts consisted primarily of extremely anti-Russian statements and that he sometimes suggested the United States should not have entered the war. After his release, Day returned to Finland with his wife Edit, whom he had married in Riga in 1940. He resumed reporting for the Tribune as its Baltic correspondent in late 1962 and was still filing stories in September 1966. He died of a heart attack in Helsinki on October 1, 1966.