Socialist Reich Party

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The Socialist Reich Party (German: Sozialistische Reichspartei) was a West German political party founded in the aftermath of the Second World War, in 1949 as an openly National Socialist and Hitler-admiring split from the German Empire Party. Leading figures included Otto Ernst Remer, a former Major General, and Fritz Dorls.

The SRP claimed Konrad Adenauer was an American puppet and that Karl Dönitz was the last legitimate Führer of a pan-German Reich. It denied the existence of the Holocaust and claimed the ovens of the Dachau concentration camp were built by the United States after 1945. The SRP also advocated Europe, led by a reunited German Reich, supposedly as a 'third force' against both capitalism and communism.

Yet according to Martin A. Lee, in The Beast Reawakens, the SRP never openly criticised the Soviet Union^[4] because the Soviet Union funded the SRP as it held anti-American and pro-Soviet views. The Communist Party of Germany, on the other hand, did not receive Soviet funds because it was viewed as "ineffectual"^[5]. Remer is said to have once commented that if the USSR ever did invade Germany, he would 'show the Russians the way to the Rhine'^[6].

The SRP had its own paramilitary organisation, the Reichsfront.

The SRP had about ten thousand members and it won 16 seats in the Lower Saxony Landtag election, and in Bremen scored 8 seats. It was banned in 1952 by the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany, the only court with the power to do so.

[edit] Notes

• 1 Martin Lee, The Beast Reawakens (Warner Books, 1998), p. 50.
• 2 Ibid.
• 3 Ibid.
• 4 Ibid, p. 58.
• 5 Ibid, pp. 74-75.
• 6 Ibid, p. 65.