GERMANY: Ragtag Reminders

For a month Germans had been fretting over what they called exaggerated U.S. and British reports of resurgent Naziism in West Germany. Last week their own government dispatched police into Hamburg and Bremen to round up key men in a blatantly Nazi movement called the German Free Corps.

Eleven were arrested and a twelfth warrant was issued for one already in custody—Dr. Gustav Scheel, former Nazi Gauleiter for Salzburg, who was one of seven ex-Nazi bigwigs jailed by the British last month on charges of "plotting to regain power" in West Germany. Among those newly arrested are four of the known leaders of the Freikorps Deutschland, a semimilitary, anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic and anti-Masonic organization that was formed in 1951. The jailed leaders: Hermann Lamp, an unreconstructed ex-SS sergeant; Helmuth Beck-Broichsitter, onetime major in the Grossdeutschland Division, who is also the chairman of a strutting veterans' organization called Bruderschaft; Alfred Frauenfeld, pre-Anschluss Nazi leader in Vienna; Eberhard Hawranke, ex-Brownshirt.

The Free Corps members (somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000) swore fresh fealty to Adolf Hitler, took their oaths on a copy of Mein Kampf, insisted that the rightful leader of Germany is Admiral Karl Doenitz, Hitler's designated heir, who still has three more years to pay in Spandau prison for his war crimes. A threadbare, ragtag lot, the Freikorps met, often in groups of 150, in beer halls, and talked of a Nazi government in West Germany, "possibly by 1957." Unlike the group arrested by the British, which was clever enough to realize that neo-Nazis must avoid the obvious Nazi trappings, the Freikorps deliberately set out to be pennywhistle Hitlers. As such, they were a laughable lot—except to a world that once laughed over the doings in a Munich beer cellar.