Head of Banned Anti-semitic Party Sentenced in Germany to Jail

Fritz Dorls, who headed the anti-Semitic Socialist Reich party, largest of the postwar neo-Nazi movements, until it was banned in 1952 when he took refuge in Egypt, has been sentenced to 14 months in jail by the local District Court. He was charged with public insult, fraud and with being the ringleader in a subversive organization. He has filed an appeal.

Joining the Nazi party in 1929, he served as a lecturer at one of its Indoctrination and Training Institutes. Military Government authorities interned him for a year, After the Nazi German collapse, because he was deemed politically dangerous. Newspapers of the Christian Democratic Union nevertheless engaged him as a journalist until he openly switched allegiance to a succession of fascist splinter groups. In 1949 he was elected to the Bundestag on the ticket of the German Rightist party.

When the anti-Semitic Socialist Reich party was formed a few months later that year, Dorls was chosen its leader. Soon after the party was outlawed as unconstitutional, warrants for Dorls’ arrest were issued by the district attorneys of Dortmund and Bonn. The warrants could not be served because Dorls had gone to Egypt, partly, it was learned later, on behalf of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, a top Bonn Government agency. The mission involved a suit against key Bonn officials by Joachim Bertelet, German coordinator of the Arab campaign against ratification of the West German-Israeli reparations pact. Dorls sought evidence against Bertelet in Cairo.

The District Court, in sentencing Dorls, refused to consider him to have been a fugitive from justice either during his stay in Egypt or when he was in hiding in Westphalia after his return. Taken into custody in the summer of 1955, he was released after a short time. The custody period was deducted from his sentence.