Adenauer's Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration by Norbert Frei

Author:Norbert Frei [Frei, Norbert]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Tags: History/Europe/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2010-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

The Rise and Banning of the Socialist Reich Party (1951–52)

I will not stand for being called a Nazi. I was, I am, and I will remain a National Socialist.

—Otto Ernst Remer in Braunschweig, 15 March 19511

I

n the first German Bundestag, there was little disagreement among the larger parties about the need, in case of doubt, to prescribe sanctions against organized right-wing extremism. As had already been made clear at the start of the debate over the reintroduction of criminal-legal statutes for political offenses, the SPD and the CDU were in wide agreement about interpreting the principle of a “defensible democracy” postulated in the Parliamentary Council2 above all in terms of appropriate punishment. The readiness for administrative and policing measures increased under the pressure of rallies led by radical agitators, with crowds that had been growing since the spring of 1950, along with a hesitant criminal justice system and inadequate Constitutional Court jurisdiction. The SRP, in particular, would feel the weight of such measures; this organization was attempting to profile itself as the Nazi Party’s successor with special directness, provocativeness, and success.

Outer impressions were enough to make the intentions clear: uniformed hall guards, red flags with black Reich eagles replacing the forbidden swastika, marching music (preferably Hitler’s signature melody, the “Badenweiler”), and so on, accompanied by scarcely masked terminological echoes: Reichsredner (“Reich orator”), Führungsprinzip (“leadership principle”), völkische Gemeinschaft (“community of the Volk”). The identity was not only apparent in such matters of style, but, of course, in both ideological underpinnings and personnel.3 The SRP did indicate vague distance from Nazism and the “Third Reich” in certain points involving “mistakes” that could not be justified to a broader public—above all points related to the “Jewish question.”

The party had been founded at the start of October 1949 by former middle-level Nazi functionaries.4 Its organizational and agitational center was Lower Saxony. This was the base from which its chairman, Fritz Dorls, entered the Bundestag, on the list of the German Reich Party—shortly before first becoming an “independent,” then a member of the Economic Reconstruction Association parliamentary faction. But the SRP’s real star was retired Major General Otto Ernst Remer, who had gained desultory fame for his role in crushing the July Plot as commander of the Großdeutschland guard battalion, stationed in Berlin. Following a period of internment during which he received training as a bricklayer, Remer—now thirty-seven—again began grabbing headlines in the summer of 1949.5 In gatherings of the Association of Independent Germans, a precursor of the SRP, he justified his own earlier role with sharp attacks against the “traitors” of 20 July. A few weeks before the fifth anniversary of the failed attack, the Friesland denazification board classified Remer as a nonincriminated person, their reasoning being that he had only done his military duty (as a career officer, he had never joined the Nazi Party). This produced a journalistic outcry, Remer becoming the main target of those who had hoped to see a positive West German interpretation of the anti-Hitler resistance take hold on the anniversary’s occasion.

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