Inventing Neo-Nazism

Ever since the far-right National Democratic Party won a scattering of local offices in West German elections last March, the French press has been running alarmist accounts of what it calls the rise of neo-Nazism. The biggest shocker to date appeared last month in Paris Match. Headlines blared: "These are the Nazis of 1966. Their success disturbs Germany. They have forgotten nothing. They have understood nothing." To prove the point, the magazine ran two pictures of young men decked out in Nazi regalia; in one they are saluting a bust of Hitler and in another, so the story said, they are carousing and singing the Horst Wessel song.

So provocative were the pictures, they were picked up by the London Daily Express, which reprinted them with a new caption: "For Hitler--greetings from the new Nazis." Moscow television also made the most of the Paris Match spread. On a program marking the 25th anniversary of the German invasion of Russia, the pictures were shown after some film clips of De Gaulle's visit. Said the announcer: "As one can see, West Germany today is a gigantic cradle of neo-Nazism."

Casual Joke. In Germany, the pictures stirred immediate suspicions. For one thing, the alleged Nazis sported shaggy locks, a grooming no genuine Hitler youth would approve of. For another, a girl wore a Nazi party arm band, a decoration never permitted the weaker sex. And there was a package of French cigarettes on the table. Whoever heard of a Nazi indulging a decadent French taste? Sensing a phony, Munich reporters soon smoked it out.

They tracked down a costume-store proprietor named Peter Breuer, who recalled renting the Nazi garb to some men who told him they wanted to write a story on his shop. "I had absolutely no suspicion," said Breuer, "not the way they fooled around, laughing themselves silly while they took the photographs." Next, Munich police rounded up three youths who claimed that they had been talked into posing as a joke. Back in Paris, Paris Match Reporter Jean Taousson and Editor Andre Lacaze casually admitted the hoax. "The photos may imply stronger political ideas than those people really hold," Taousson explained lamely. "But in the article we did not say they were politically dangerous. We said they were nostalgic for Nazism, and in fact they are."

Poisoned Atmosphere. Germans were furious. Calling the photos a "gross forgery," Bonn Press Chief Karl-Guenther von Hase demanded that the French government take action against Paris Match. Prince Konstantin of Bavaria promised to bring the issue before the Bundestag, and he complained that a magazine of the "reputation and importance of Paris Match cannot be allowed to poison the political atmosphere for the purpose of creating a phony sensation." Said Die Welt's Munich correspondent Wilhelm Maschner, who has done some sober reporting of his own on German neo-Nazism: "Such false alarms tend to weaken resistance against the real causes for alarm."

Meanwhile, sharp-eyed German reporters spotted what they considered to be still another phony photo in Paris Match. The picture purported to show some neo-Nazis in a beer hall lifting their mugs in a gesture of solidarity. In fact, at the moment the photo was snapped the German reporters said the beer drinkers were toasting not Hitler but Charles de Gaulle.

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