Foreign News: ... and the Bad

• Share

The West had taken a calculated risk in Western Germany. It had given "good Germans" some of the freedom needed for training in democracy (see above). But inescapably, as occupation controls relaxed, "bad Germans" had moved in to try to claim the nation's soul again.

Among the most noisome of the "bad Germans" is stocky, pushing Wolfgang He.dl.er, 50, an early Nazi, now a formally denazified member of Bonn's Bundestag. Hedler's denazification is skin-deep. A reactionary Deutsche Partei man, he believes that Hitler's defeat was no failure of fascism; it sprang from the "treason and sabotage of the resistance movement." Last November in Einfeld Hedler boldly harangued a crowd of refugees, disgruntled farmers, ex-officers and soldiers.

Germany, he insisted, was least guilty of any of the warring powers in World War II. He smeared Social Democratic Leaders Waldemar von Knoeringen (chief of the party's Bavarian unit) and Kurt Schumacher (national boss), and Schles-wig-Holstein's Christian Democratic Leader Theodor Steltzer as Anglo-American lackeys and informers. He sneered at them for making "such a big fuss about Hitler's barbarism against the Jews.

Whether it was right to gas the Jews is a debatable proposition. Maybe there were other ways of getting rid of them . . ."

The Deutsche Partei promptly expelled Hedler, the Bundestag lifted his parliamentary immunity. Early this month, Hedler was haled into Neumünster court to answer charges of defamation of the Jews, incitement to class hatred, libel of Knoeringen, Steltzer and Schumacher. Of the three judges, two were ex-Nazis. Last week they found Hedler legally blameless.

At Bonn, the Social Democrat Bundestag members read a resolution calling the Neumünster verdict "a new, heavy blow and disgrace to the German people." In Kiel, the trade unions stopped work for 90 minutes in protest. The Christian Democrat press service warned: "The Weimar Republic collapsed because of [similar] tolerance toward its known enemies." U.S. High Commissioner John J. McCloy had a stinging comment: "I doubt, that [Hedler] can or will ever be acquitted morally by public opinion . . ."

The Bonn government announced that it would tighten the Civil Code to deter future Hedlers. An official move got under way to try Hedler again in a denazification court. "Good Germans" like Knoeringen and Inge Scholl would have to do the rest.