Former members of Hitler’s Elite Guard have in recent weeks intensified holding of meetings at which prominent ex-Nazis have been principal speakers to audiences whose members openly wear forbidden war decorations, including swastikas, Jewish community leaders reported today.
The ban on all such meetings, it was reported, was being by-passed by a camouflage that they are being held as searches for “missing soldiers.”
At a recent meeting in Innsbruck, former SS Gen. A. Meyer praised the role of the SS during World War II. Participants in the meeting placed a swastika-decorated wreath before the statue of Andreas Hofer, Austrian national hero.
A similar meeting was held in Wiener-Neustadt where several thousand war veterans, including former members of the Hitler Elite Guard, were in attendance wearing decorations and swastikas. They applauded demands of speakers for abolition of the ban against wearing the Nazi emblem and for the rehabilitation of members of the Elite Guard.
Another development in the efforts at revival of Nazi elements was sharp attack in the neo-Nazi newspaper, Wiener Montag, against Ernst Haeussermann, the newly-appointed director of the Vienna Burgtheater, because he emigrated to the United States in 1938. Asserting that the emigration made him unworthy of leading the “first German theater,” the neo-Nazi sheet said Haeussermann had been a member of the “same army” which had destroyed the Vienna opera house during World War II and thus had been “an active emigrant on the other side.”
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