Von Thadden Soya Npd Will Combat Party’s “neo-nazi” Image

Adolf von Thadden, chairman of West Germany’s right-wing National Democratic Party (NPD), said the party’s executive planned to purge radical speakers contributing to the “neo-nazi” image. In his first news conference since the NPD captured 9.8 per cent of the vote and 12 seats in the recent Baden-Wurttemberg state election, von Thadden said his party believed that opponents were looking for a pretext to get it banned.

To counter such efforts, he said, the Executive will toughen party discipline “since there must not be the slightest doubt that the NPD is taking seriously its devotion to parliamentary democracy and freedom.” He said the party would maintain a check on all speakers and issue special certificates to those who qualified as NPD representatives.

The NPD chairman denied that his party was “neo-Nazi,” declaring it was a “national party” devoted to democracy. He denied again that he had been a member of the Nazi party. He asserted the NPD was financially healthy and that membership had increased from 31,000 last November to more than 38,000. He predicted a membership of possibly 50,000 by 1969 when elections are scheduled to the Bundestag, the lower house of the Parliament. Declaring that the NPD would spend up to $2.5 million in that election, he forecast it would win 40 to 50 Bundestag seats and was expecting to offer a candidate for the Presidency next year.

In a related development, Vice Chancellor and Foreign Minister Willy Brandt warned that Germans could no longer deny that “middle-class radicalism and neo-nationalism” were growing in the Federal Republic. Speaking at Mainz, Brandt said there was a danger that the “democratic center” could be eroded by extremists of the right and left, and called for a dynamic Government policy to offset this tendency.