Interior Minister Ernst Benda told the Bundestag (lower house) that he would submit material gathered on the extreme right-wing National Democratic Party (NPD) to the government shortly and ask it to approach the Constitutional High Court at Karlsruhe for a ban on the NPD, Mr. Benda’s ministry conducted an exhaustive investigation of the NPD which is reputedly neo-Nazi. Observers here however saw little chance that the government would take action to ban it. Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger and a majority of the cabinet are opposed to such a move.
West Berlin authorities are pressing the Allied powers to ban the NPD in the city together with two extreme right-wing newspapers. An appeal last week to the occupying powers–U.S., Britain and France–was the second in recent months by Mayor Klaus Schutz of West Berlin with the backing of the City Council. The mayor asked for a ban on the NPD’s newspaper, Deutsche Nachrichten and the ultra-nationalist, anti-Semitic newspaper, Deutsch National und Soldaten Zeitung. The latter newspaper and its editor, Gerhard Frey, were also the subject of a complaint lodged by the Federal Government with the Constitutional High Court at Karlsruhe.
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