Hanns Neuerbourg; AP reporter covered Elvis and Mideast

Mr. Neuerbourg, who was born in Germany, had moved to the northern Swiss city of Stein after his retirement 1991. He died Saturday in a hospital where he was undergoing treatment for lung cancer, said his friend Barbara Hespe.

Robert H. Reid, AP’s news director for Afghanistan and Pakistan and its bureau chief in Kabul, said Mr. Neuerbourg was a standout.

“Hanns was an incredible journalist, a man with eclectic tastes, an amazing grounding in languages, and a lively intellectual curiosity,’’ said Reid, who knew Mr. Neuerbourg since the 1970s, when they both covered central and eastern Europe.

Mr. Neuerbourg covered the 1967 war between Israel and Arab forces in the Middle East, reporting from Jordan and Egypt, and the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia. He was in Geneva when the Soviets invaded and he made several attempts to enter Czechoslovakia from Germany before finding a way in through Austria.

He was briefly bureau chief in Cairo until he was expelled for breaking the news that the Soviet Union was rearming Egypt.

As Geneva bureau chief, Mr. Neuerbourg covered dis- armament, the Afghan talks, and other issues. He also interviewed personalities such as violinist and conductor Yehudi Menuhin and pianist Arthur Rubinstein.

Victor Simpson, AP’s bureau chief in Rome, who knew Mr. Neuerbourg from decades of covering the pope, recalled him as “an extremely cultured man. I remember his fascination with his meetings with Yehudi Menuhin.’’

Mr. Neuerbourg was impressed with how down-to-earth Presley was when he interviewed him in his villa while Presley was on Army duty in Germany in the late 1950s.

Among his coups was a telephone interview with Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, getting the German leader to confirm that he was planning to rearm the country so he could fulfill the wishes of the Americans to provide another ally.

Mr. Neuerbourg soon switched to the English-language side of the operation and began getting assignments outside of Germany.

He was born into a family of industrialists with an anti-Nazi background in Luedenscheid, but served in the German military in Russia and Italy.

He did not learn of the Nazi atrocities to the Jews until 1942, when he heard in the Crimea from a fellow soldier that he understood Germans had just machine-gunned many Jewish men, women, and children.

“I didn’t believe it at first,’’ Mr. Neuerbourg said.

It was confirmed to him the next day by a soldier who had participated.

“It has been on my mind ever since,’’ Mr. Neuerbourg said in a recent interview.

Mr. Neuerbourg developed an interest in a journalism career at 15 when his father subscribed to an English and a French news- paper for him.

“I always wanted to be a journalist,’’ he said.

Mr. Neuerbourg leaves a daughter, Stephanie Aerni-Neuerbourg.