NAZI SLOGANS REVIVED IN WEST GERMAN ELECTION

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23023, 13 August 1949, Page 5

NAZI SLOGANS REVIVED IN WEST GERMAN ELECTION

(10.45 a.m.) - < BERLIN, Aug. 12. New reminders of Nazism have cropped up in the campaigning for Sunday’s election.

The people of Hanover awoke this morning to find the town had been plastered with Nazi emblems during the night.

British officials entering the High Court found swastikas painted on the steDs.

At a rally of the Rightest Party at Oldenburg, near the North Sea coast todav. an enthusiastic welcome was given to Maior-Genoral Ernst Remer, who suppressed the 1944 plot against Hitler. General Remer said he had received many letters from Germans declaring: “You lead, we follow.” A Nazi slogan was “The Fuhrer command: we follow.” Leaflets containing Nazi propaganda were distributed in Bochum, a Ruhr steel town. Another underground letter is circulating widely among Nazi sympathisers trhoughout Western Germany, urging a protest vote at the elections. It urges the recipients to invalidate their ballot papers with a “large *ed cross across the entire voting paper.” The letter is being sent to former Nazis SS men and Germans of known nationalistic views. It asks them to mimeograph or copy the letter and send it to their "friends.” It declares that the “present system of representation of the people is useless and requires changing.” High Allied officials said today that the anti-Allied attacks which have been a feature of the election campaign, may prove a boon to communism. They still insisted, however, that the Communists would do well to get 10 per cent of the total vote —about what they got three years ago. Anything which stirred resentment against the Western Allies played right into the hands of the Communists, said one British official. An American official expressed concern that the extreme Right-wing parties might profit as well as the Communists from the frequent symptoms of nationalism in the election speeches. Dr. Kurt Schumacher, the Social Democratic leader, has sent a telegram to the three Western occupation Powers demanding that the dismantling of German industries should cease immediately.