School for Democracy

School for Democracy The hatchet-faced little man known as Fritz Roessler disappeared in the rubble of the defeated Third Reich. A street corner no-good until he joined Hitler's brownshirts, he rose in Nazi favor by cultivating a Fuhrer mustache and showing a high talent for defiling Jewish graves. He became a captain in the German army, and Nazi propaganda boss in the state of Saxony.

Several months after Roessler's disappearance, a bumptious little man wearing sideburns turned up in the West Zone city of Hanover. He was, he said, Franz Richter, Ph.D., a schoolmaster who had been expelled from his home in the Sudetenland by the Czechs. His papers had got lost on the long journey from the Russian front. During the war, he said, he had served as a Wehrmacht paratrooper in a company commanded by Captain Fritz Roessler. As Dr. Richter told it, Roessler had been killed in the Ukraine. He had personally helped bury him, and had promised to take care of his widow and orphaned children.

The Far Right Seat. Impressed by Richter's Ph.D. and by his vigorous denial of Nazi sympathies, Hanover school authorities gave him a job as a mathematics teacher. Sure enough, he took good care of Frau Roessler--in fact, he even married his old captain's widow, and adopted her four children.

But Dr. Richter was soon showing distressing tendencies. He told his classes that Germany lost the war because Jews sabotaged the production of "new secret weapons." Yet he managed to wangle an appointment to the "school of democracy," run by the British Foreign Office at Wilton Park near London, for promising Germans. He was an apt pupil in the six-week course, but after he got back he sounded more than ever like an unrepentant Nazi. He was fired from his teaching job for "political indiscretions." Then he got into politics.

He attended an International Fascist Conference in Sweden, which adopted the slogan "Fascists of the World Unite!" In 1949, he stumped Hanover as a Neo-Nazi, won a seat in the Bundestag in the first West German election. This entitled him to a listing in the German Who's Who, which accepted his assertion that he was born in Smyrna, Turkey in 1911 (Smyrna's public records were destroyed by fire in 1922).

In the Bundestag, Richter took his seat at the extreme right, beside the window, and won headlines as a rabble-rousing windbag who orated against German war guilt, praised dictators, delivered the first anti-Semitic speech in the new assembly, and, during last month's Schuman Plan debate, got thrown out of the house for three days for defying the chairman.

The Phony Signature. Dr. Richter's Hitler-like antics were his undoing. On an anonymous tip, government investigators looked up U.S. war records in Berlin. In a file of top-drawer Nazis, they found Fritz Roessler's name and picture, and it was plainly the face of Dr. Franz Richter; so was the handwriting. He had audaciously remarried his own wife, adopted his own children, lived unsuspected--and still true to the Fuhrer--for seven postwar years.

Next day German plainclothes cops arrested Fritz Roessler as he signed his phony name in the Bundestag lobby list; they led him off through a basement window to a waiting car, to avoid photographers out front. He went quietly, freely admitting his B deception. A shocked Bundestag committee quickly lifted his parliamentary immunity. The charges brought against him as he sat in Bonn jail: forgery of documents, unauthorized job-holding, use of false name and--a grave offense in Germany--unauthorized use of a Ph.D.

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