Chilean Public Cold To Nazis

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30399, 25 March 1964, Page 22

Chilean Public Cold To Nazis

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter— Copyright) SANTIAGO (Chile). Most Chileans are turning a cold shoulder to the emergence of a brown-shirted Nazi organisation which claims a membership of 6000 youths. The National Socialist Movement is trying to revive the Hitlerite practices of the German Third Reich, including anti-Semitic propaganda and use of the swastika insignia. Its members are mainly of German descent. Political experts say that the group has caused hardly a ripple in Chile’s political scene although it is emerging in preparation for the Presidential elections next year. The former Partido Nacionalists de Chile (Chilean Nationalist Party) flourished for a time here before and during World War IL It embraced a Nazi ideology but had little influence on Chilean public opinion. And it died with the Allied victory at the end of the war. The new movement gained public notice here in August, when its leader, 25-year-old Franz Heinz Pfeiffer-Ritcher, self-proclaimed heir of Adolf

Hitler, announced that he would lead a “battle against the Jews.” Pfeiffer, a youth of German descent, who wears a Nazi uniform, made his proclamation before a group of 30 young men. He said he had decided to nominate a candidate for the Presidential elections. Jewish businessmen, he said, are to blame “for the flight of capital away from Chile.”

So far, the activities of the so-called Movimiento Nacional Socialista have been limited to sticking on walls posters bearing the words: “Nazism will save Chile.”

Pfeiffer says his movement does not mean to follow a policy of “direct action” to gain power but will use "the free and wide road of democracy.” He calls himself the “Grand Dragon” in a local version of the title of the Ku-Klux-Klan. He also claims to be creator of the “Arayan Knights of the Secret Kingdom” in a continent which is a melting pot of races. He was indicted for trying to dynamite a synagogue in Santiago on May 21, 1958.

Three days later, his group tried to set fire to a Jewish club. Almost simultaneously, three other synagogues were attacked. Pfeiffer and four of his “little dragons” went to prison. When the police broke into his local headquarters, they found an odd collection of symbols: black hoods similar in pattern to the white ones worn by the American Ku-Klux-Klan, Nazi flags and pictures of Hitler. The Court of Appeals set the whole group free on the grounds of insufficient evidence on some of the charges. However, the trial will now enter a second phase; the attacks on the synagogues. The Appellate Court will be hearing the case shortly. In the years immediately before World War H and during that war, the inhabitants of Santiago were often astonished to see youths parading in Mussolini and Hitler uniforms. Military training of the Chilean youths of German descent went on at the sports fields of the resident German colony, the Sportverein. Those of Italian descent also went there. During the 1938 presiden-

tial election campaign and on election day, when the left wing candidate heading the popular Front won, Nazi youths perpetrated a number of acts of violence, including assaults upon and destruction of left wing party electoral headquarters in several precincts.

It is often argued that the triumph of an obscure schoolteacher, Don Pedro Aguirre Cerda, in that election, owed much to public indignation over what was considered excessive police action in putting down the Nazis.