West Germany’s continuing struggle with the remnants of the Hitler era was marked today by a jail sentence for West Berlin’s most rabid anti-Semite of the post war era. Erwin Schoenborn, 43, was sentenced to eight months in jail by the Goettingen district court which found him guilty of libeling Dr. Eugen Gerstein mair, the Speaker of the last of the last Bundestag.
Schoenborn, who is chairman of various neo-Nazi splinter groups and of a “German-Arab Society” which has chapters in several cities, was convicted of calling Dr. Gers tenmaier a “vile traitor,” during a series of small town political meetings. The epithet was used because Dr. Gerstenmaier, during the Hitler regime, had been sentenced by a “People’s Court” for failing to betray an anti-Nazi movement.
Meanwhile, the “German Social Movement,” which has close relations with the Arab League, held a convention this week in Freudenstadt and featured numerous addresses, most of them marked by anti-Semitic innuendoes, delivered by a number of open devotees of Hitler. Chief among these was Karl Priester, former Hitler Youth and S.S. leader who now heads the movement and edits its anti-Semitic monthly magazine.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
