Charge That Four German Neo-nazis Trained by the PLO in Lebanon Had the Help of the German Embassy

The opposition Christian Democratic Union (CDU) has charged that four German neo-Nazis, trained by the Palestine Liberation Organization in Lebanon had the help of the West German Embassy in Beirut despite the fact that they had criminal records and were wanted by the authorities.

Carl-Dieter Spranger, the CDU expert on interior policies, charged that the Social Democratic government of Chancellor Helmut Schmidt was guilty of “dangerous neglect” in dealing with recent revelations of military cooperation between West German neo-Nazis and the PLO.

Spranger said that the annual report of the Federal Service for Domestic Security disproved the reply by Interior Minister Gerhard Baum to the charge in a key detail. That detail, Spranger declared, was Baum’s assertion that the four neo-Nazis had established that they had no criminal records and received help from the Embassy in Beirut on that assurance.

The CDU called the answers given by Baum to a series of parliamentary questions on the issue “unsatisfactory.” The CDU urged the federal government to “tell the whole truth” about the issue, and to answer specifically why the West German Embassy in Beirut helped neo-Nazis working with the PLO and whether that Embassy had made available information about the four neo-Nazis to other West German government services.

In his answers, Baum confirmed that an unspecified number of German neo-Nazis received PLO military training in an Al Fatah camp near Beirut and that this information had been available to West German authorities since the start of 1980. But Baum insisted that the information was not enough to justify legal steps against the leader of the neo-Nazi group training in PLO installations.