Bank vor Handel in Scheepfahrt

From Trying to Please by John Julius Norwich.  Page 159.

My work in the Foreign Office was fairly humdrum. I was allotted to the Northern Department, which despite its name catered not only for the whole of Scandinavia but also for what was in those days the Soviet Union and its five satellites: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. Although the war had been over for seven years there were still any amount of postwar claims to be settled, one of the most important of which had been lodged by a Dutch organization with the irresistible name of the Bank vor Handel in Scheepfahrt. I was also responsible at the lowest level for the satellites, opening all the mail that arrived from our two Embassies and three Legations,26 dealing with as many as I could and referring the rest to my superiors. It seems to me now that the very words at the head of the letters—“British Embassy, Prague” or “British Legation, Bucharest” made my heart beat faster; brought up as I had been on the novels of Eric Ambler and many others of the same ilk, Central Europe and the Balkans exercised a strange fascination. I longed to be there and awaited my first foreign posting with growing impatience.