Evidence that Nazi Storm troopers with headquarters in Brooklyn drill with rifles at a camp at Boonton, N. J., was placed before the Congressional Committee Investigating Un-American Activities yesterday by a former member of the Friends of New Germany.
The witness, Ludwig Werner, fifty-one, of 33 Kossuth place, Brooklyn, testified under examination by Congressman John W. McCormack, chairman of the committee that he had been discharged from the storm troop organization for refusing to take part in the rifle drill.
He said that the storm troop organization, an offshot of the Friends of New Germany, numbers 120 uniformed men.
“Do they have any target practice,” he was asked.
“Yes,” he replied, “recently they ordered 2,000 bullets and went to a camp at Boonton, New Jersey, for exercises.”
“Were they real bullets?”
“Yes. And they use five millimeter guns.”
Werner testified that the storm troopers are organized in groups “the same as the military” and drill an hour and a half a night.
He said that “Mr. Ballin,” an officer on the S.S. Albert Ballin, lectured the group three times and gave them “instructions from the other side.”
One of the lectures occurred after the shooting of Col. Roehm, Hitler intimate, Werner asserted, and Ballin said that “we have to do the same thing here. We can’t shoot, so we must use other methods.”
Werner followed Hugo Haas, “fuehrer” of the Nazi children’s camp at Griggstown, N. J., and Kurt Luedecke, former chief of the Nazi press bureau at Washing-
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.
