Some 5,000 former resistance fighters and survivors of Nazi death camps rallied on the site of Dachau yesterday, the first of the death camps, and demanded that the Government ban the extreme rightist National Democratic Party, which they denounced as neo-Nazi. The rally took place following a meeting in Munich of delegates representing 25,000 resistance fighters. Munich was the birthplace of the Nazi Party.
Meanwhile, discussions were under way here on a proposed electoral reform that would prevent the NPD from getting seats in the next Bundestag, West Germany’s lower house. The proposal would replace the present system of proportional representation with a system based on a majority vote. The NPD has won seats in seven of West Germany’s 11 state legislatures on votes ranging from six to under 9.8 percent of the ballots cast. In Berlin today, four men putting up NPD posters assaulted and badly beat a man who had shouted “down with the NPD.”
The Egyptian Government is stamping the passports of Egyptian citizens ‘not valid for West Germany” in an effort to keep them from travelling to this country, it was reported here.
In another West German-connected development, the president of Keren Hayesod, fund-raising arm of the Zionist movement, praised today the contribution of West German Jewry to the 1967 emergency fund for Israel launched at the time of the Six-Day War. Receiving a delegation of West German communal leaders in Jerusalem, Dr. Israel Goldstein noted that the campaign in West Germany last year had raised more than $7 million.
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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.