Neo-Nazi Retreat

Like weeds in the rubble, a cluster of neo-Nazi parties sprouted in postwar Germany. The only one to cause any serious worry among U.S. officials was the Socialist Reich party (SRP), which last year polled 360,000 votes in Lower Saxony. Its mouthpiece was a cut-rate Goebbels, former Major General Otto Ernst Remer, who peddled the line that Germany must return to the "good things" in Naziism. Last November, the West German government jailed Remer, asked the federal constitutional court to outlaw the party.

Last week the SRP announced that it would "voluntarily" dissolve itself. Secretary General Fritz Heller tried hard to make out that the move was only a strategic withdrawal--necessary to protect party members from Communist agents, who were supposedly threatening them. (In the past, the Reds and the neo-Nazis have been cheek by jowl.) But most Germans were convinced that the SRP was trying to dodge being outlawed, would try to continue to spread its poison underground.

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