Socialist Reich Party
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Socialist Reich Party of Germany (German: Sozialistische Reichspartei Deutschlands) 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.[1] It denied the existence of the Holocaust, claimed the ovens of the Dachau concentration camp were built by the United States after the war and that films of concentration camps were faked.[2] The SRP also advocated Europe, led by a reunited German Reich, as a "third force" against both capitalism and communism.[3]
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 said that if the USSR ever did invade Germany, he would "show the Russians the way to the Rhine" and that SRP members would "post themselves as traffic policemen, spreading their arms so that the Russians can find their way through Germany as quickly as possible".[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
- ^ Martin Lee, The Beast Reawakens (Warner Books, 1998), p. 50.
- ^ Lee, p. 50.
- ^ Lee, p. 50.
- ^ Lee, p. 58.
- ^ Lee, pp. 74-75.
- ^ Lee, p. 65.
[edit] External links
  |
This article about a political party in Germany is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
|
|||||||||||
