* Roots: For the first time since...

* Roots: For the first time since his family fled the Nazis in 1933, Sen. Rudy Boschwitz (D-Minn.) will return to Germany next spring to look for his East Berlin birthplace. Boschwitz, who was 2 years old when his Jewish family left Germany, knows the address of his home but doesn’t remember the structure. “When he was sitting watching television pictures from Berlin and East Germany . . . he felt the real urge to go back” for the first time, said press aide Tim Droogsma.

* Party time: Kendall Truitt, a gunner’s mate involved in the Navy investigation of the deadly turret explosion aboard the USS Iowa this year, and his wife, Carol, were to be in New York today for Penthouse magazine’s party for its Pet of the Year, Stephanie Page. Truitt gave Penthouse an exclusive interview about the disaster and his friend Clayton Hartwig, who was killed in the blast. The Navy blames Hartwig for the disaster. Another guest will be Paul Janszen, who blew the whistle on Pete Rose’s gambling.

* Critical: Dith Pran, the journalist whose suffering in his native Cambodia was portrayed in the movie “The Killing Fields,” says the United States is condoning a group “worse than Hitler”--the Khmer Rouge. Americans should not believe they will change if returned to power in Cambodia, he told college students in Galloway Township, N.J., adding, “The Khmer Rouge (were) worse than Hitler because they kill their own people and they destroy their own culture.”

* Honored: James K. Batten, chairman of Knight-Ridder Inc., has won the William Allen White Foundation Award for Journalistic Merit. The award is given annually to the journalist who most closely mirrors White in “service to profession and country.” Batten, 53, directs an international news operation that publishes 29 daily newspapers.