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Socialist Reich Party

The Socialist Reich Party (German: Sozialistische Reichspartei Deutschlands) was a West German political party founded in the aftermath of World War II in 1949 as an openly neo-Nazi-oriented splinter from the national conservative German Right Party (DKP-DRP). The SRP achieved some electoral success in northwestern Germany (Lower Saxony and Bremen), before becoming the first political party to be banned by the Federal Constitutional Court in 1952. They were allied with the French organization led by René Binet known as the New European Order.[5] There is some evidence pointing towards the possibility of the party being funded by the Soviet Union via the KGB.

Socialist Reich Party
Sozialistische Reichspartei Deutschlands
AbbreviationSRP
Leader
Founded2 October 1949
Banned23 October 1952[2]
Split fromDeutsche Rechtspartei
Merged intoDeutsche Reichspartei[3]
Youth wingReichsjugend [de]
Paramilitary wingReichsfront
Membership10,300 (1951)
IdeologyNeo-Nazism
Political positionFar-right
Colours  Red   Black
Party flag

Origins

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It was established on 2 October 1949 in Hameln by Otto Ernst Remer, a former Wehrmacht major general who had played a vital role in defeating the 20 July plot, Fritz Dorls, a former editor of the CDU newsletter in Lower Saxony, and Gerhard Krüger, leader of the German Student Union under the Third Reich, after they had been excluded from the DKP-DRP. The SRP saw itself as a legitimate heir of the Nazi Party; most party adherents were former NSDAP members. Its foundation was backed by former Luftwaffe Oberst Hans-Ulrich Rudel.

 
SRP leaders (left to right): Dorls, Remer, and Wolf von Westarp in August 1952

Views

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The party claimed Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was an American puppet and that Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz was the last legitimate President of the German Reich, as he had been appointed by Adolf Hitler.[4] It denied the existence of the Holocaust, claimed that the United States built the gas ovens of the Dachau concentration camp after the Second World War and that films of concentration camps were faked.[4] The SRP also advocated Europe, led by a reunited German Reich, as a "third force" against both capitalism and communism.[4] It demanded the re-annexation of the former eastern territories of Germany and a "solution of the Jewish question". According to Karl Dietrich Bracher, "SRP propaganda concentrated on a vague 'popular socialism' in which the old Nazis rediscovered well-worn slogans, and also on a nationalism whose championship of Reich and war was but a thinly disguised continuation of the Lebensraum ideology".[6] The SRP also promoted the stab-in-the-back myth, structured itself in a very hierarchical manner reminiscent of the Führerprinzip, organized meetings that featured uniformed guards, and "succeeded temporarily in presenting Remer as the protector of the Third Reich against the 'traitors' of the resistance".[6]

According to Martin A. Lee, although the SRP was anti-communist, it focused on criticizing Britain and the United States for "splitting their beloved Fatherland in two" and avoided criticism of the Soviet Union in the hope that a future deal could be made with the Soviets to reunite Germany.[7] The SRP took the stance that Germany should remain neutral in the emerging Cold War and opposed the West German government's Atlanticist foreign policy. In case of war between the Soviet Union and the West, Remer "insisted that Germans should not fight to cover an American retreat if the Russians got the upper hand in a war", and said that he would "show the Russians the way to the Rhine" and that SRP members would "post themselves as traffic policemen, spreading their arms so that the Russians can find their way through Germany as quickly as possible".[8][9] Martin A. Lee alleges that these statements attracted the attention of Soviet officials, who became willing to fund the SRP for tactical reasons. According to Lee, for a few years in the early 1950s the SRP received Soviet funds while the Communist Party of Germany did not, due to being purportedly viewed as "ineffectual".[10][11] The SRP viewed Israel as an "enemy power" in its foreign policy.[12]

One of the most significant pieces of evidence is the testimony of Otto Ernst Remer. In a 1997 interview, Remer admitted that he had received Soviet backing during his time in the party. Remer stated that he had met with KGB officials in East Berlin and had received financial and logistical support from the Soviet Union.[13] In addition to Remer's testimony, there are other sources of evidence that support the claim that the Soviet Union supported the SRP. For example, a 1953 KGB memo outlines the agency's efforts to cultivate and support right-wing extremist groups in Germany, including the SRP. The memo states that the KGB's aim was "to create a rightist movement that will weaken the position of the United States, weaken the position of the Atlantic bloc, and encourage the German population to seek a neutralist policy".[14][15] Similarly, the CIA's declassified "Family Jewels" documents reveal that the agency had evidence of Soviet funding for far-right groups in Europe, including the SRP.[16] Other examples of this include a comment supposedly made by Wolf von Westarp that the West Comminission of East Germany´s ruling Socialist Unity Party, was a substantial patron of the party.[17] Historian Michael Burleigh, in his book The Third Reich: A New History, discusses the Soviet Union's support for the SRP during the Cold War in extreme detail.[18] Additionally, the Gauck archives in Germany contain evidence of Soviet support for the SRP. The archives contain documents that show that the Stasi, the East German secret police, had frequent meetings with SRP officials and provided them with financial and logistical support.[13]

Election results

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Campaign Token SRP (Sozialistische Reichspartei), obverse
 
The reverse shows a donation of 1 Mark

Dorls had been elected as a DKP-DRP deputy to the Bundestag parliament in the 1949 election. The SRP gained a second seat in parliament, when MP Fritz Rössler (alias Dr. Franz Richter) joined the party in 1950. In May 1951 it won 16 seats in the Lower Saxony state assembly (Landtag) election, receiving 11.0% of the votes with strongholds in the Stade region (21.5%; Verden district: 27.7%). It included as a member the much decorated Luftwaffe ace Heinz Knoke. In October 1951 it gained 7.7% of the votes in Bremen and won 8 seats in the city's Bürgerschaft parliament.

Membership

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The SRP had about ten thousand members. Affiliated associations were the Reichsfront paramilitary organisation and the Reichsjugend youth wing, which were banned by a decision of the Federal Minister of the Interior on 4 May 1951. On the same day, the West German cabinet decided to file an application to the Federal Constitutional Court to find the SRP anti-constitutional and to impose a ban. In anticipation of this judgment, the party dissolved itself on 12 September 1952, but this decision was not accepted by the Federal Constitutional Court.[19] Before the ban, Remer had compared the situation of the SRP with that of the early Christians, referred to High Commissioner John J. McCloy as "the Pontius Pilate who had caused Herod [to] crucify the SRP", and declared that "if we should be banned, we shall descend into the catacombs".[20] On 23 October 1952, according to Article 21 Paragraph 2 of the Basic Law, the Constitutional Court judged the party to be unconstitutional and forced its dissolution, prohibited the founding of any successor organizations, withdrew all Bundestag and Landtag mandates, and seized the party's assets (BVerfGE 2, 1).

Four years later, the Communist Party of Germany was also banned. They are still the only political parties with Bundestag representation to be outlawed by the Constitutional Court in the Federal Republic of Germany.[citation needed]

See also

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Notes

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  1. ^ Rees, Phillip (1980). Biographical Dictionary of the Extreme Right Since 1890. New York: Simon & Schuster. p. 215. ISBN 0-13-089301-3.
  2. ^ "Entscheidung der amtlichen Sammlung (BVerfG) E 2, 1" (in German). Die Bundesregierung hat beim Bundesverfassungsgericht am 19. November 1951 den im Beschluß vom 4. Mai 1951 angekündigten Antrag gestellt. Sie behauptet, die innere Ordnung der SRP entspreche nicht demokratischen Grundsätzen, beruhe vielmehr auf dem Führerprinzip. Die SRP sei eine Nachfolgeorganisation der NSDAP; sie verfolge die gleichen oder doch ähnliche Ziele und gehe darauf aus, die freiheitliche demokratische Grundordnung zu beseitigen [On November 19, 1951, the federal government submitted the application announced in the decision of May 4, 1951, to the Federal Constitutional Court. It claims that the internal order of the SRP does not correspond to democratic principles but rather is based on the leader principle. The SRP is a successor organization to the NSDAP; they are pursuing the same or at least similar goals and aim to eliminate the free democratic basic order.]
  3. ^ "Mitteilungen" [Report] (in German). Bavarian Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Archived from the original on 16 May 2008. Retrieved 16 September 2009.
  4. ^ a b c d Lee 1998, p. 50.
  5. ^ Coogan 1999, p. 400.
  6. ^ a b Bracher, Karl Dietrich (1991). The German Dictatorship. The Origins, Structure, and Consequences of National Socialism. Penguin. p. 581.
  7. ^ Lee 1998, p. 58.
  8. ^ Lee 1998, p. 65.
  9. ^ Tetens, T. H. (1962). The New Germany and the Old Nazis. London: Secker & Warburg. p. 78.
  10. ^ Lee 1998, pp. 74–75.
  11. ^ Atkins, Stephen E. (2004). Encyclopedia of modern worldwide extremists and extremist groups. Greenwood. pp. 273–274. ISBN 978-0-313-32485-7.
  12. ^ Büsch, Otto (1957). "Ideologische Grundlagen der SRP". In Otto Stammer (ed.). Geschichte und Gestalt der SRP. Rechtsradikalismus Im Nachkriegsdeutschland. Vol. 9. Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien. pp. 24–52. ISBN 978-3-663-19663-1.
  13. ^ a b Lee, Martin A. (10 September 2000). "Strange Ties: The Stasi and the Neo-Fascists". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 11 April 2023.
  14. ^ Andrew, Christopher (2000). The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (1st ed.). Basic Books. pp. 312, 323–325. ISBN 9780465003129.
  15. ^ Levenda, Peter (2014). The Hitler Legacy: The Nazi Cult in Diaspora: How it was Organized, How it was Funded, and Why it Remains a Threat to Global Security in the Age of Terrorism (1st ed.). Ibis Press. pp. 269–270. ISBN 978-0892542109.
  16. ^ Osborn, Howard (16 May 1973). "Family Jewels" (PDF). CIA.
  17. ^ Coogan 1999, p. 401.
  18. ^ Burleigh, Michael (2001). The Third Reich: A New History (1st ed.). Hill and Wang. pp. 481–482, 494. ISBN 978-0809093267.
  19. ^ "Neo-Nazis Ban Party in Germany". The New York Times. 13 September 1952. p. 1.
  20. ^ Lee 1998, pp. 82–83.

References

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Further reading

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