Many Germans reacted angrily today to the award of the $2,500 Konrad Adenauer journalism prize to an extreme right-wing writer whose articles attacking Israel have been published in the neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic newspaper, Deutsche National and Soldaten-Zeitung. The award was made by the Germany Foundation to 67-year-old Emil Franzel, a Sudenten German columnist and freelance journalist. The Foundation was established in 1966 to encourage “national self confidence” and improve the “German spirit.” It persuaded former Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, then 90 years old, to lend his name to its annual prizes some months before he died in April 1967. The Foundation has been described here as “ultra-conservative’ and a conduidior Nazi ideas.
Franzel wrote anti-Israel tracts during last June’s Arab-Israel war which appeared in the National and Soldaten-Zeitung. In one of them he accused German leftists of not loving the German Fatherland but Israel and not caring for the rights of 12 million Germans driven from their homes but for the rights of Israelis. Several months ago he wrote about students who demonstrated against the conservative West German publisher, Axel Springer, in terms that suggested the application of Hitler’s “final solution” against them. “Vermin can be exterminated only with suitable mechanical and chemical means and not persuasive talks,” Franzel said. Protest was aroused here by the Germany Foundation’s award of the Adenauer literary prize to Frank Thiess, a novelist who has also been published in the National und Soldaten-Zeitung and who has been accused of inflaming German nationalism and apologizing for some of the offenses of the Nazi era.
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