Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 24 – Many in Russia
and the West have been horrified by the Kremlin’s playing with extreme right
neo-Nazi parties in Europe over the last several years, but as Pavel Pryanikov
points out, Moscow has a long tradition of doing so, albeit not always so
ostentatiously as Vladimir Putin has done.
Perhaps the most notorious case of
Soviet support for a neo-Nazi activist involved Otto-Ernst Remer, a Wehrmacht
officer who played a key role in blocking the July 20, 1944 plot against Hitler
but who later, supported by the Soviet secret police, pushed for the creation
of a single German-Russian state to fight American imperialism and Zionism (ttolk.ru/?p=23592).
As Pryanikov points out, “Remer’s
post-war fate is a good example of how the USSR created ‘a fifth column’ in the
West, regardless of the political and ideological views of those it recruited”
because “in order to recruit Remer, the USSR did not have to search for any
compromising information.” He “sincerely
supported” what Moscow wanted to promote.
During World War II, Remer fought in
the Eastern Front and in the Battle of the Bulge. In January 1945, at the age
of 32, he became the youngest German general. At the end of the war, he was
arrested in the American zone but ultimately released and then began his
post-war political career in which Soviet agents were deeply involved.
In 1949, he founded the Socialist
Reich Party, a neo-Nazi organization supported by the Soviet Ministry of State
Security that won seats in both the regional and national parliaments in the western
zones of Germany and that supported the idea of “GeRussia,” a single
German-Russian state to oppose the US and Zionism.
Following arrest and then release,
Remer “on the recommendation of the Ministry of State Security of the USSR”
moved to the Middle East where he worked first for Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Naser
and then for the Syrian government where with Alois Brunner, the former head of
Nazi concentration camps in France, he helped create the security services for
that country.
In the early 1980s, he returned to the
Federal Republic where he attempted to restart a Neo-Nazi party and spoke out
repeatedly against the US, NATO and Zionism, again with the financial backing
of the KGB. His Nazi views disposed him toward Russia: he said that “Russians
were whites, while the US was very much contaminated by racial minorities.”
In 1994, the German authorities
sentenced him to 22 months in prison for inciting hatred and racism, but before
he could be put in jail, he fled to Spain where he died three years later,
Madrid having refused to extradite him to Germany.
A year before his death, Pryanikov
says, Remer in despair over what Boris Yeltsin had done in Russia, called for a
confederation of Germany and Russia which would absorb the countries of Eastern
Europe under joint rule. The new common state, he suggested, should have its
capital in Minsk.
The Russian blogger appends to his
article a fragment from Remer’s 1983 “Manifesto of the German Liberation
Movement.” In it, the former Nazi
general wrote that “Germany must leave NATO, the Americans must get out of
Germany and out of Europe, and we must develop partnership with Russia – here are
the goals which stand before true German patriots now.”
“For Reagan and the Zionists,” Remer
said, “The Soviet Union is the incarnation of evil, but for us it is a great
power neighboring us with its own security requirements and a doctrine that
corresponds to them.”
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