Resurgence on the Right

Inspired by leftist radicals, neo-Nazis become more active

Beer mugs in hand, a dozen men relaxed together in an isolated forest clearing. The uniforms they wore were disturbingly familiar: brown shirts, black breeches, high black boots; the swastika motif on their red, black and white armbands was repeated on flags massed behind them. Then, standing at attention, the men thrust their arms upward in a Heil, Hitler salute. Armed with rifles, they goose-stepped through a military drill.

Old newsreel footage from Hitler's heyday? A movie or television drama about the Third Reich? No. The scenes were from recently filmed documentaries about neo-Nazi organizations in West Germany. Although their numbers are minuscule, and their threat to democracy in the Federal Republic nonexistent, the neo-Nazis have become more openly militant in recent months -- inspired, perhaps, by the brazen terrorism of the leftist Red Army Faction.

The neo-Nazis have not been accused of any murders or kidnapings. Officials believe, however, that they were responsible for three bank robberies, netting a total of $270,000, as well as six raids on military depots in which weapons and ammunition were stolen. In one foray against a NATO training facility in Bergen-Hohne, sentries were surprised by intruders wielding submachine guns who also took weapons and ammunition.

Police later charged Salesman Uwe Rohwer, 40, a well-known neo-Nazi in Schleswig-Holstein, and four of his followers with the crime of forming a terrorist group. It marked the first time that this charge, drawn to deal with radicals of the left, had been invoked against the right.

Arrests of other neo-Nazis on such lesser charges as carrying weapons illegally or disturbing the peace have increased from 80 to 300 in a year. Criminal incidents attributed to the far right rose from 330 in 1976 to 613 last year. More disturbing, there has been an upsurge in anti-Semitic activities, including the desecration of Jewish synagogues and cemeteries with swastikas or Nazi slogans.

Despite the increase in overt activity, membership in extreme rightist organizations, including those that are neo-Nazi and illegal, is well below the postwar 1959 high of 56,200. The extreme rightist National Democratic Party has only 9,000 adherents. Like the West German Communist Party, the N.P.D. is a legal political organization and a singularly ineffective one: in the 1976 general election, the party received only 122,000 votes out of 37.8 million cast.

In addition to the N.P.D., there are an estimated 126 illegal neo-Nazi groups in West Germany. None of them has more than 300 members. Some of them are "alte Nazis" or oldtime Hitlerites like Manfred Roeder, 50, a disbarred lawyer who leads the Deutsche Buergerinitiative (the German People's Movement). Roeder, who recently disappeared underground to escape charges of "public incitement," has damned the present West German government as an "illegal piece of dirt run by criminals." Whoever thinks otherwise is "a Jew-loving idiot."

About half of today's neo-Nazis are under 40; many were not even alive in Hitler's day. Michael Kuehnen, 22, for example, the son of a Hamburg businessman, was dishonorably discharged as a Bundeswehr lieutenant for his political views. Kuehnen now occupies himself running a small (20 member) Hamburg group known as the Aktionsfront Nationaler Socialisten, or Action Front of National Socialists. Like Roeder, Kuehnen counts largely on U.S. neo-Nazis for his financial support. Most of the younger recruits are children of middle-or upper-class families who oppose the West German system because they consider it corrupt and because they dislike its democratic compromises. In this they echo the disaffected members of the radical left.

So far, there are no signs of any links between the neo-Nazi and the leftist radicals, although extreme rightist publications praise the Red Army Faction for what one of them calls "highly motivated action against the criminals ruling our society." The neo-Nazis, however, have unsuccessfully attempted to forge links with Palestinian guerrillas, presumably thinking that the two groups shared a common anti-Jewish bias.

Small and ineffectual as the extreme right may be at the moment, West German authorities have no intention of letting it become larger or any more active. As Bonn University Historian Karl-Dietrich Bracher notes: "In the 1920s too there was a situation in which only small groups existed, not a large organization." West Germans overwhelmingly support the government's intention to eliminate the neo-Nazis by legal methods. Says Heinz Oskar Vetter, head of the West German Federation of Unions: "We cannot permit neo-Nazis to gain a foothold in our political life."

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