The existence in the United States of an agent working for the Socialist Reich Party, a Nazi-line political group in Germany, was discovered today following a statement issued yesterday by the American Jewish Committee charging that the Socialist Reich Party has not disbanded as party officials announced last month.
The American representative of this party, it was established by the A. J. C., is Harold Keith Thompson Jr., 30, an American-born Yale graduate and a Navy veteran. He has registered with the Department of Justice as American agent for the neo-Nazi group, which is considered the post-war successor of Hitler’s Nazi Party. He has not notified the government agency that the party which he represents was supposed to have disbanded.
In a statement to the press Mr. Thompson “explained” that since the reported dissolution of the party he has been unable to communicate with its leaders, Dr. Fritz Doris, member of the West German Parliament and a former Nazi, and Maj. Gen. Otto Ernst Remer, who smashed the 1944 plot against Hitler in Berlin. “I believe they are in custody, “Mr. Thompson said. “I certainly do not propose to desert these gentlemen. I admire the fight they have made for civil liberties.”
The agent of the Neo-Nazi group revealed he has informed the American Government that he proposes to continue his work and would like to know whether he must register as agent for any other foreign group. He described the conviction and imprisonment of Hitler’s leaders as illegal and immoral, and added that if Hitler were alive and in prison “I would work for his freedom, too.”
Mr. Thompson said he knew of no evidence of the existence in Hitler Germany of crematoria or of the mass killing of Jews, Poles or others. “I concede there may have been excesses, as there always are in wartime, but those excesses were brought about by the treasonable activities of Jewish groups against the German state,” he said. “Hitler’s program was an expression of the justness of Germany’s desire for its full sovereignty and the realization of its historical claims for territories which had been taken away.”
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.
