GERMANY: A Much-Perplexed People

Are the Nazis coming back? Last week, commenting on West Germany’s local elections, some foreign newsmen seemed to think they are. New York Timesman Drew Middleton, who has been making predictions of a Nazi revival for years, reported the specter of German fascism overhanging every ballot box. Bonn protested “splash headlines” and “one-sided reporting” by foreign correspondents. Conditions in Germany, said Konrad Adenauer’s press chief, are “extraordinarily stable”; the election proved that both left and right extremists are “steadily sinking in numbers.”

Actually, the election itself—a purely local scramble for 100,000 council seats—proved very little. Three facts stood out: 1) neo-Nazis and other right-wing radicals made gains, all of them proportionately small; 2) the established democratic parties—Konrad Adenauer’s right-of-center coalition and the opposition Social Democrats—sturdily held their ground and their majorities; 3) the Communist vote diminished to 2.8%.

Good Old Days. Nazi gains were concentrated in the state of Lower Saxony, where unemployed and underfed refugees from Soviet Germany were attracted by the fierce Irredentism of men like Wilhelm Schepmann, onetime chief of staff of Hitler’s Storm Troopers. For the first time since the war, the Nazis dared to campaign on the “good old days” of Hitler. “Germans, the best people on earth . . . are forced to live like animals,” stormed Schepmann. “The Jew, as dictator of democracy, Bolshevism and the Vatican rules over you,” read a swastika-stippled pamphlet.

But the Nazi propaganda got more attention in the foreign press than it did in Germany. Even in Lower Saxony, where a quirk in the voting laws gives each registered voter three separate votes, only four overt Nazis, one of them Schepmann, were elected to office. Of 18 million votes cast in West Germany, neo-Nazi and right-wing radicals netted about 1,800,000.

Longing for Power. Also apparent was a shift from the center to the right of Konrad Adenauer’s three-party coalition. The Free Democratic Party (FDP), strongly nationalist, picked up more support than any other party; its show of “strength, chiefly at the expense of Adenauer’s own Christian Democrats, will probably ensure the nationalists a bigger say in German policy.

John J. McCloy, retired U.S. Commissioner for Germany, shrewdly assessed the possibilities of a Nazi comeback in his final report to the State Department, published last week. “It is hardly credible,” wrote McCloy, “that [the Germans] would . . . again embrace a pseudo-philosophy which disgraced and degraded their fatherland … But they are, on the whole, not so keenly aware of the danger as those who suffered directly from Nazi evil. They are confused by charges which associate Nazi crimes with traditional German nationalism; they are tempted to justify the war and to blame the Allies for failing to understand that they were really fighting to defend the West . . . They are, in short, a much-perplexed people, trying to find their way out of a deeply disturbing and humiliating experience without loss of self-confidence and self-respect.” Mc-Cloy’s conclusion: “The all-prevailing power of the [Nazis] has left many former officials with a longing for a return to power. This element and the undercurrent of extreme nationalism . . . might form a combination willing again to set Germany off on another disastrous adventure. This is a possibility which cannot be ignored . . . but it has less chance, in my judgment, of recurring than at any time in recent German history.”