Neo-Nazis

Yellow, green and candy-pink garlands from the last dance still decorated the town hall at Westercelle, 22 miles north of Hannover. On the stage hung a big flag: the black Imperial German eagle with outstretched talons on a red field. A loudspeaker blared military marches as spectators (mostly Wehrmacht veterans) filled the hall. Here & there an amputee clumped in, leaning on a cane. The men had come to a campaign rally of the Sozialistische Reichspartei (Socialist Reich Party), the closest thing to a Nazi party Germany has seen since war's end.

The Frustrated. The speakers talked a straight Nazi line. It went down well. The audience shouted and enthusiastically stamped at attacks on the U.S. and its "Kaugummi" (chewing gum) soldiers. Next day, in elections for the Landtag (state assembly), no fewer than 11% (366,790) of Lower Saxony's 3,393,696 voters cast ballots for the Neo-Nazi S.R.P. Kurt Schumacher's Socialists hung on to their controlling role in the government coalition, with 33.7%; Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's Christian Democrats, in combination with another right center party, got 23.8%. The S.R.P., founded less than two years ago and never before a contestant in an election, won 16 seats in the 158-seat Landtag. It had also won hundreds of thousands of supporters in Lower Saxony (which has 400,000 unemployed), mainly among frustrated veterans for whom postwar Germany has found little place, former Nazi officials who lost wealth and power, and refugees from East Germany who feel they have nothing to lose but their misery.

The S.R.P. line: Germany lost World War II only through treason; atrocity charges are Allied propaganda, e.g., Dachau's death chambers were built after the war on American orders. S.R.P. professes to be against both the West and Russia; actually, it consistently stresses Russian strength and Western weakness. Many Germans suspect that the S.R.P. is financed by the Russians, but there is no concrete proof.

New Editions. The party's brain is Count Wolf von Westarp, 45, one-armed former newspaperman and SS officer. But its loudest mouthpiece is former Major General Otto Ernst Remer, 39, who in 1944 helped to cause the failure of the anti-Hitler plot.* With his sunken cheeks and gleaming eyes, Remer is a Goebbels-type rabble-rouser.

Typical Remer blast: "Rather than have our women and children overrun by the Russians ... it would be better to post ourselves as traffic policemen, spreading our arms so that the Russians can find their way through Germany as quickly as possible . . . [and] pick lords and ladies out of their silken beds."

Alarmed by the Neo-Nazis, the Bonn government has outlawed S.R.P.'s own version of the Nazi SS, the Reichsfront, strong-arm squads "for maintaining order at meetings." Bonn, however, did not interfere with S.R.P.'s Reichsjugend (a new edition of the Hitler Youth) and Frauen-bund (Women's League), kept passing the buck to the Lower Saxony state government, which passed it back to Bonn. Last week, after S.R.P.'s show of strength in the election, Bonn's Minister of the Interior, Dr. Robert Lehr, declared: "We are determined to stamp out the fire." Bonn proposed to do the job through a new Federal Constitutional Court, to be set up soon to view constitutional questions, but it probably would be months before any stamping could be done.

*Remer, then a major commanding a Berlin Guard battalion, was ordered by superior officers, who were conspiring to assassinate Hitler, to seize certain government buildings in Berlin. Instead, Remer tipped off Goebbels, who had the conspirators arrested.

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