Minister Without Portfolio Waldemar Kraft, prominent leader of the B. E. H., the Refugee Party, has been named Acting Minister of the Interior during the absence of the official incumbent in that post, Dr. Gerhard Schroeder. The latter is on a vacation for a period of uncertain duration. As Acting Minister of the Interior, Kraft, former captain in the Nazi Storm Troops, is holding down now the most important and powerful domestic political office in West Germany, and is guardian of the republic’s constitution.
Kraft was a captain in Himmler’s black-shirted Elite Guard, which was branded a criminal organization by the International Military Tribunal at Nurnberg. He was also a member of the Nazi Party. After the capitulation of the Nazi regime in 1945, the British authorities, who were generally lenient, adjudged Kraft so dangerous a Nazi that they interned him for more than two years.
There is documentary proof that a Storm Troop captaincy was conferred on Kraft ten weeks after the Germans overran Poland in 1939. Kraft was a resident of Poland since 1898, and a citizen of that country. Born in Poznan, in what was then Prussian territory, Kraft became a leader of the German minority in post-World War I Poland. He served in one of the “Free Corps,” armed nationalist group that fought giants the Poles and served as a training ground for Nazi rowdies.
OPPOSES REPARATION AGREEMENT BETWEEN GERMANY, ISRAEL
Under the German occupation of Poland, Kraft became president of a provincial Chamber of Agriculture, then advanced to the managership of the “Reich Corporation for Agriculture in the Government-General, ” the Nazi body set up to exploit that part of Poland which Hitler had not incorporated outfight into the German Reich.
Early in 1950, Kraft was “denazified. ” He was appointed Deputy Minister President and Minister of Finance in Schleswig-Holstein. Later in 1950, when he was still drawing unemployment compensation, he was elected national chairman of the B.H.E., the Refugee Party. As part of the price Chancellor Konrad Adenauer had to pay last year when he included the B. H. E. in the Bonn governmental coalition, Kraft was given one of the federal ministries-without-portfolio.
Two years ago, Kraft announced himself publicly as opposed to the operations agreement between West Germany and Israel. The official press of the opposition Social Democratic Party describes his elevation as a “blunder” and as a “psychologically mistaken step, in view of the generally-heard allegations about the resurgence of neo-Nazism in Germany. “
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.
