At least 40 high school students, and perhaps as many as 80, may be involved as members of Nazi youth groups here whose aim is “to get rid of all Jews and Negroes,” it became known today while the FBI and the local police intensified their investigations of the bombing of the local synagogue.
The bombing, in which the FBI found dynamite had been used, took place last Thursday night at Kehilath Israel Temple, where 51 windows were shattered by the explosion. The only occupants of the house of worship at the time of the explosion, were the caretakers who were in their apartment in one wing of the synagogue. They were not hurt. A swastika had been painted on the front of the synagogue a day before the explosion, and another swastika was discovered at another synagogue nearby, three days earlier.
Federal Bureau investigators and local police said today they found that some of the self-styled student Nazis possessed Nazi-type uniforms, arm-bands bearing the swastika, daggere, and literature calling for ridding the community of Jews and Negroes. At least 12 boys, teen-age member of a group called the Nordic Reich Group, are being questioned.
The youths arrested so far are students at East High School and Southeast High School here. In the school locker of one of the youths, the FBI found a statement of the group’s purpose, declaring: “Our party is joining with the National Socialist German Workers Party. Our founder is Adolf Hitler. The war ended in 1945, but the ideas have not died.”
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.
