Insinuation that Nazis are needed in political key positions in Germany, so as to exclude Jewish influence from the country’s political life, was voiced at a public meeting here by Hermann Ahrens, member of the Cabinet in the state of Lower Saxony.
Addressing a rally convened by the BHE Refugee Party, of which he was formerly floor leader in the state legislature at Hanover, the Lower Saxony Minister of Economics avoided to mention the word “Jew.” However, he referred to “racially alien elements,” a derogatory phrase commonly employed in Nazi parlance to designate Jews and “non-Aryans.” No translation can render the pungently anti-Semitic flavor of the expression, but “ethically alien forces” or “racially alien elements” come closest.
In an apparent effort to explain why formerly prominent Nazis do not heed the well-meaning advice to keep in the background for a decent interval before elbowing their way to the center of the political stage, Ahrens told the BHE audience: “We have recognized that politics may not be left in the hands of racially alien elements. We left the political stage in 1945, but we returned to it because there was no other choice.”
The Cabinet Minister’s candor in referring to Nazis as “we” may be due to attacks directed against him in a recent election campaign by neo-Nazi extremist Adolf von Thadden, a member of the last Bundestag, who charged that Ahrens failed to represent Nazi interests properly, even though he had been elected as a Nazi and with Nazi votes. Ahrens had joined the Nazi Party as early as 1931. After the war, the British considered him so dangerous a security risk that they interned him in a camp for Nazi activities during a two-year period.
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.
