Homeseekers

How widely they patrol the Seven Seas the British demonstrated last week when one of their cruisers (her name painted out) slid up to the Japanese liner Asama Maru, homeward bound from San Francisco, just as she raised land off Yokohama. A shot over his bows was needed to make the Japanese captain stop. Three British officers and nine seamen went aboard. They had a list of German passengers on the Asama Maru, whose passports they proceeded to check. One German hid in the ship's false funnel, another in a barrel, but the boarding party seized and removed 21 others, all of them able-bodied seamen of military age, former Standard Oil employes being returned to Germany via Japan and Siberia. Japan promptly kicked.

This performance was of interest to 512 former crew members of the scuttled German liner Columbus, sent last fortnight from New York's Ellis Island to be held at San Francisco's Angel Island until passage home could be arranged for them. They had been booked on the Japanese Tatuta Maru but reports of British war vessels waiting offshore to grab them changed this plan. In charge of getting the Columbus men back to the Fatherland is Adolf Hitler's crony. Captain Fritz Wiedemann, Consul General at San Francisco. Waterfront talk was that, now that the British were on the alert, he would try shipping them in small lots on different ships, perhaps even on the Japanese "fishing boats" with which California waters abound.

In Manhattan, one Otto Prignitz, 58, a scarfaced, monocled German architect, received orders to report in the Fatherland for duty as an aviation instructor. From the German Consulate he got money for his passage via Siberia. Last week he went to Harlem for one last fling before returning to the land of Aryans. When it was over he found he had lost $117. He got a policeman to arrest his party companion, a Negro lady named Miss Reno Jones. In court, the judge told Otto Prignitz he must wait, perhaps several weeks, to testify against Miss Jones. "I cannot wait that long," blustered Otto Prignitz. "I must obey Fuehrer Hitler and get back to Germany at once. It is obvious I am needed there." The judge decided to make sure that the alleged thief of Patriot Prignitz's cash should not go untried. He held the robbed man in $5,000 bail as a material witness. Otto Prignitz wailed: "This means my ruin. . . . Nobody in the whole Reich will believe my story of why I was delayed."

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