Party Leader of National Democrats, with Nazi Record, Kept out of Party Talks

A deputy leader of the extreme right-wing National Democratic Party (NPD), who has a Nazi record going back to the pre-World War II era, is being kept out of sessions of the party’s leaders in which high level strategy is being mapped for next year’s national elections. Officially, the absence of deputy Wilhelm Jutman has been explained by the fact that he is in the hospital. It was reliably learned, however, that his participation in the party counsels would embarrass NPD chairman Adolph Von Thadden who is trying to rid the party image of the taint of extremism. Jutman. who served a long prison sentence beginning in 1947, has been accused of taking part in the notorious “crystal night” of November, 1938, when synagogues were burned and Jewish business establishments were wrecked all over Germany.

Von Thadden, meanwhile, announced at a press conference that the NPD will spend between nine and ten million marks (more than $2 million) in its campaign for seats in the Bundestag, West Germany’s lower house. The party, which has been described here and abroad as “neo-Nazi,” holds seats in seven of the country’s 11 provincial legislatures. Its electoral progress has been viewed with growing alarm.

Hopes entertained by the NPD that a new election would have to be called in Baden-Wurttemberg, scene of the party’s greatest electoral triumph, were apparently dissipated today when it was disclosed that the Social Democratic Party had voted, by a large majority, to continue its coalition with the Christian Democratic Union in the state. The neo-Nazi party won 9.8 percent of the seats in the state legislature April 28, mainly at the expense of the Social Democrats. Withdrawal of the Social Democrats from the coalition would have made new elections necessary since the Christian Democrats did not have a majority by themselves and the only other party with whom they could enter a coalition, the Free Democrats, refused to join them.