A German court has ordered the German Party, rightist member of the West German coalition government, to remove anti-Semitic posters it bad distributed in Lower Saxony where the rightist party has its greatest strength.
The posters, accusing Social Democratic leader Erich OIIenhauer of being a Jew, were signed by the election chairman of the Gandersheim district of the German Party, who is a former Nazi police captain awaiting reinstatement to his post.
Printed in the black, white and red of Imperial Germany and the nationalist movement, the placards contain a-letter asking Mr. Ollenhauer whether “rumors” that he is a Jew and served in the British army as a “Jewish emigrant11 are true. Then the poster adds that the Social Democratic leader never replied to the letter of inquiry, thereby intimating that the “charges” are true. The poster also chides the Socialist party for having picked its leader from among “the chosen people.”
Mr. Ollenhauer brought suit for libel in a Brunswick court. The court granted a temporary injunction giving the German Party 24 hours to remove the posters. Meanwhile in Bonn, Henrich Hellwege, Minister for Federal Affairs in the Adenauer Cabinet and national chairman of the German Party, has apologized to Mr. Ollenhauer for the fact that he had been “degraded by such vicious personal attacks.” In other areas of Germany photographs of Mr. Ollenhauer on election posters have been defaced by stickers with the word “Jew” pasted across them.
The sixty-two year old Socialist leader, who was elected a member of his party’s executive in Germany at the time of Hitler’s advent to power, emigrated with the other members of the executive to Prague, Paris and finally London before he returned to Germany in 1946. In the past, he has denied that he is Jewish, but has not managed to allay the neo-Nazi charges. The neo-Nazis have attempted to convince the Germans that he “looks” Jewish and that only Jews fled Germany during the Therefore he regime, therefore he must be a Jew.
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