Loaded with records seized from the offices of William Dudley Pelley, Silver Shirt leader and anti-Semitic publisher, an Army plane was speeding back to Washington from Asheville, N.C., this afternoon. Armed with a capias calling for Pelley’s arrest on charges he violated his parole, Asheville authorities raided the Pelley headquarters last night.
Included in the records were documents linking Pelley with officials in Germany, Chairman Martin Dies of the House Committee Investigating Un-American Activities said. Dies would not say whether Pelley himself, for whom the committee has had a subpoena outstanding for months, had been apprehended.
So important was the evidence seized that Dies obtained the use of an Army bomber at Bolling Field and dispatched Richard Barker, one of the committee’s investigators, to Asheville today to bring the documents back to Washington. It was reported, but not confirmed, that Pelley would also be brought to Washington in the Army plane, which was dispatched with greatest secrecy and expected back at 6 p.m.
The order for Pelley’s arrest was issued by Superior Court Judge Zeb Nettles in Asheville on the ground that Pelley had violated the conditions of two suspended sentences by consorting with known enemies of American institutions, distributing literature aimed at the overthrow of the Government and leveling “disgusting epithets at the office of the President of the United States.”
Meanwhile, the Dies committee heard Fritz Heberling, leader of what was formerly the German Bund but is now the Association of German Nationalists, an organization composed entirely of Nazis of German birth and citizenship with several hundred members in Chicago, describe his activities. Heberling said his organization made it a rule not to interfere in American politics.
James J. Metcalfe, committee investigator who had joined the German-American Bund at one time, quoted Heberling as disapproving of the Bund’s tactics and Fritz Kuhn. “I can’t understand how they can attempt to be loyal to two countries at the same time,” Metcalfe quoted Heberling as saying.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
