Attack & Counter

West Germany's Christian Democrats are plainly getting worried about the popularity of West Berlin's fiery Socialist Mayor Willy Brandt, who will be Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's principal opponent in next September's national election. With his record of standing up to the Russians in Berlin, Brandt is invulnerable to the usual charge that German Socialists are "soft" on Communism. So Christian Democrats are attacking Brandt on other grounds-charging that during World War II, Willy Brandt was "anti-German," even fought against Germans in the Norwegian army.

A right-wing newspaper, the Neue Presse of Passau, added a few more accusations--that Brandt fought with the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War; that he served in the Norwegian army and even fired on German troops; and that after the war, Brandt referred to Germans as "criminals." Brandt sued for libel.

West Germany's bull-necked Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss (TIME cover, Dec. 19, 1960), who like Brandt is in his 40s and a likely future candidate for Chancellor on the Christian Democratic side, picked up the cudgel. "We certainly have the right to ask," said Strauss in a speech in Bavaria, "what you [Brandt] did outside Germany during those twelve years. Just as we were asked, 'What did you do inside Germany?' We know what we did." Brandt has told his own side of the story before. Violently anti-Nazi and in danger of arrest, he fled to Norway in 1933. When the Nazis invaded Norway in 1940, Brandt put on a Norwegian uniform--at the insistence of friends who were trying to keep him from being grabbed by the Gestapo and shot. He returned to Germany in 1945 as a Norwegian correspondent, with Norwegian citizenship and a Norwegian wife. But the citizenship was not entirely by choice: his German citizenship had been revoked by the Nazis in November 1938.

A fair infighter himself, Willy Brandt countered last week that Adenauer's chief aide, Dr. Hans Globke, was a high official in the Nazi bureau that revoked Brandt's German citizenship. Snapped Brandt: "It is pure insolence that the expelled citizen of 1938 should apparently apologize for this to those who in 1938 expelled him."

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