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Neo-Nazis. Since 1949, a million ex-Nazis have been re-enfranchised. A dozen pennywhistle Fuhrers are after their votes, but most of their votes will probably go to the extreme right wing of Konrad Adenauer's coalition. Some queer fish have swum into the Free Democratic Party and the German Party, seeking respectability. Until recently they had nowhere else to go.
Now a neo-Nazi outfit called the German Reich Party (DRP) has brazenly entered the lists. Its Führer is handsome Werner Naumann, 43, former chief of staff to Dr. Goebbels, and, by his own account, "the top-ranking Nazi at large." It was he who in 1945 broadcast from the Berlin bunker in which Hitler and Goebbels cowered,* promising the German people that "final victory" would be theirs.
Last January the British arrested Naumann and six associates, three of them ex-Gauleiter, on charges of conspiracy. Germans hissed and booed, but after a close look at the evidence, Bonn's Minister of Justice agreed that the danger was "acute." Naumann went to jail, but later was freed without trial.
His group, it appeared, had used a Düsseldorf import-export firm to organize a neo-Nazi International, with contacts in France, Britain, Spain and Argentina. German firms looking for business in Madrid were told to see Otto Skorzeny, the scar-faced ex-SS officer who recaptured Mussolini in 1943. In Buenos Aires the man to see was Hans Ulrich Rudel, the one-legged Panzer knacker (tankbuster) now attached to Dictator Perón's army-training staff, who last week was given special leave to fly to Germany for a "whirlwind tour of speeches" on behalf of the DRP.
Last week Naumann addressed a beer-hall rally in Hanover that was grimly reminiscent of early Nazi fracases. Local officials in Westphalia tried to get him banned from the ballot but the publicity would probably do him more good than harm. The betting was that his DRP would win several seats.
No More 1933s. German democracy, a sensitive plant at best, was not yet in mortal danger from evil men like Naumann. It might never be—yet a world that had ignored the doings in a Munich beer cellar in the '205 was not anxious to be duped again. The rise of neo-Naziism and the echoes it was getting from veterans, refugees, chauvinists, and a few big businessmen, served as a warning to the West: that in seeking German arms to solve the "Russian problem," it risks reviving the old "German problem."
Konrad Adenauer's virtue is that he recognizes, and knows how to deal with, both threats to freedom. During his visit to the U.S., he pledged: "We are firmly resolved not to repeat the mistakes of the Weimar Republic, which, by its exaggerated liberalism, permitted the enemies of the country to destroy its democratic institutions. We have . . . laws to prohibit and dissolve such organizations . . . and we will apply them against radical elements of both the right and the left. There will not be another 1933."