The head of West Germany’s internal security police disclosed today that there are about 30 right-wing political groups and youth organizations operating in West Germany and West Berlin. He said they had a total membership of about 98,000, half of them in adult groups which form political parties. These right-wing political parties polled a total of about 350,000 votes in the last elections, he said.
Dr. Rudolf Toyka, head of the internal security department in the Ministry of the Interior–West Germany’s FBI–cited these figures today when he received five visiting United Nations correspondents. He said his organization had screened the youth groups–15 in number, with a total membership of between 40-50,000. Only one of them, he said, was down in his records as outrightly tending towards a Nazi type of ideology. This group, which maintained contact with the German Reichs Party, had a membership of 2,300.
The majority of the youth groups, Dr. Toyka said, officially accept the democratic principles of the West German Constitution but, “whether they are Nazis at heart, I could not tell.” He said that members of these groups wore military-type uniforms, marched in military fashion and tried to glorify the old military traditions of pre-Hitler Germany. The other youth groups did not, he said, declare themselves Nazi.
Dr. Toyka, who supervised preparation of the White Book issued recently by the German Government on the outbreak of anti-Semitism in West Germany, said, in reply to a question that he had been a member of the Nazi Party from 1937 to 1945. Under the Nazi regime, he said, his job had been that of a tax collector, following a generations-old family tradition. He said that, like many other Germans, he began privately questioning the “morality” of the Nazi State.
Like “the vast majority of Germans,” he had known nothing about the Nazi concentration camps or other Nazi atrocities, he stated today. Dr. Toyka has served as head of the security organization since 1954. He was put in the job by Dr. Gerhard Schroeder, the Minister of the Interior. Dr. Schroeder himself has been accused of having been a member of the Nazi Party.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
