Murder Party

Three jolly young Germans, two of them stalwart youths and the third a pretty girl, burst shouting and laughing last month into a lonely Czechoslovak inn among the crags of snow-mantled Bohemia. They had come from Kiel to ski, they announced, and ski they did day after day, seeming to take no notice of the tiny inn's only other guest. Closelipped, morose and nervous, Herr Rudolf Wormys spent most of the time in his bedroom with the thick wooden door heavily bolted.

For months famed Radio Engineer Wormys feared that a Nazi "murder party" from Germany would get him, as Nazis got German Philosopher Theodor Lessing, shot two summers ago at Marienbad, Czechoslovakia. Herr Wormys had reasons for his fears. Once the chief technician of the radio station near Stuttgart and an ardent Nazi, he has been for some months the secret Impresario of anti-Nazi broadcasts by Adolf Hitler's deadliest personal foe, Otto Strasser.

During Hitler's climb to power the Strasser Brothers, Gregor and Otto, were his stoutest champions among Germany's proletariat. Gregor, who came to feel that Der Reichsfiuehrer had betrayed the German proletariat, was shot during the Hitler blood purge (TIME, July 9). Otto escaped to Czechoslovakia with other Nazis who thought they were going to be shot, banded them together in the Anti-Nazi Black Front. Recently Realmleader Hitler's personal newsorgan, VOelkischer Beobachter, declared that Otto's secret broadcasts from Czechoslovakia were becoming "intolerable."

Black Front broadcast procedure has been for Otto Strasser to make a violent anti-Hitler speech into a phonograph recorder, send the record to Radio Expert Wormys at the little inn. Sitting down before his powerful short-wave transmitter. Wormys would then announce "This is the Berlin Broadcasting Station," next play Otto Strasser's vitriolic attack on Adolf Hitler.

Last week nervous Broadcaster WTormys found himself getting to like the jolly skiing party. The girl especially was nice. One night lonely Rudolf Wormys invited the skiers to join him in a nightcap. Once inside his room, the two Nazi sportsmen pitched into the radio expert, tried to get him down and tie him up with a rope.

Herr Wormys wriggled from the Nazis' grasp. They drew pistols, shot him dead. Said the presumably bribed Bohemian innkeeper and his wife next morning, "We never heard a sound." Police found the room riddled with bullets.

Meanwhile the three skiers, their murder party over, had fled. Finding the frontier barrier closed to their car in the dead of night, they crossed into Germany on foot. But in Europe a good car is too valuable to be abandoned. At dawn they thriftily sent for their car, got it back well before the murder was discovered.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.