Dear Editor
Dear Editor Spanish Refugees I am baffled by Nancy MacDonald's attack on my statement that "most [Spanish] exiles who want to return are back" ("Dear Editor," October 10, 1977). If she had...
...That the reluctance has not yet been abandoned has been facilitated by the students' disinterest in history—by no means an exclusively German phenomenon...
...Anyone who has followed the emergence of the far-Right in Belgium takes it very seriously indeed...
...University of Illinois...
...That's one reason why the European Revolution will start in Belgium...
...The Death of 'Miles' "Miles," the outstanding leader of the Socialist underground movement against Hitler and an early opponent of Communist totalitarianism, died recently in London at the age of 81...
...Horst Duhnke Associate Professor of Political Science University of California, Berkeley Eliahu Salpeter replies: I wish 1 could be as certain as Carl Landauer seems to be that talk about French anti-Semitism and neo-Nazi manifestations in Belgium are just "old hat" and "crying wolf...
...The most prominent leaders of the political Right, like Franz Josef Straus and Axel Springer, were never Nazis...
...For example, in the cover story about the Belgian Rexists in the December 9 issue of the Bulletin, Belgium's English-language newsmagazine, Cleaveland Moffett quotes Emile Robe, present "leader" of the movement, praising the freedom enjoyed by the Rexists: "They envy us the opportunity we have here...
...Landauer may not be quite up-to-date in attributing present Belgian fascism to Flemish-Walloon rivalry...
...Berkeley, Cal...
...Rather, Schmidt went to what many people considered incredible lengths to control those terrorists, by having legislation enacted that made it possible to isolate them—to cut them off even from unsupervised contact with their lawyers...
...Miles foresaw the growth of centralized party states in Italy and Germany and refused to recognize any Socialist elements in the Soviet system...
...If she had reflected for a moment she would have realized that the figure she gives supports what 1 said...
...Miles and his closest associates escaped to London where he—now anglicized under the name of Walter Lowe—remained until his death, working partly as a merchant, partly as a social scientist...
...It is these teachers who write many of the textbooks, and I find it difficult to assume that the historical omissions are a result of amnesia rather than conscious choice...
...Salpeter says that Herbert Kappler, the Na/i war criminal who escaped from an Italian prison hospital to West Germany last summer, was allowed to "disappear from public eye" by ihe "outpouring of sympathy" for him...
...Many do not wish to return because they have jobs and homes in France...
...Abroad, New Beginning was represented by Karl Frank, a former officer of the Austro-Hun-garian Army, who had turned to Socialism during World War I. His return to Germany after the War was ptevented by the United States State Department, which erroneously regarded him as "too Leftist...
...Salpeter found evidence of Nazi sympathy in Belgium...
...This is primarily a result of the struggle between the Flemish and the Walloons: In both World Wars the Germans favored the Flemish, who express their hostility toward the Walloons in this absurd manner...
...Legislation to prevent attorneys from acting as couriers for incarcerated terrorists was passed specifically to correct one of the worst consequences of the past policy of bending over backwards...
...Salpeter is right in complaining about the abysmal ignorance of many German youngsters about the Nazi period...
...All this is old hat, and citing it a sign of an acute crisis is crying wolf...
...some want to go but are old and have no relatives in Spain...
...extreme Right escalation in Europe and elsewhere...
...The Dutch know better by now, and one hopes the French, Greeks, Italians, etc., will learn this, too— though not, I hasten to add, by having something terrible happen within their own borders...
...The end of New Beginning came when Miles admitted that the overthrow of the Nazi regime required, besides internal resistance, military defeat by a coalition of anti-Nazi countries...
...No wonder that New Beginning was sharply attacked not only by the Nazis but also by the Communists, even by Trotsky...
...By a regrettable slip of pen the negative was dropped from the relevant sentence in the article...
...Initially a Communist, editor of the CP paper in Konisberg, Miles nevertheless joined Paul Levi in his opposition to the Communist policy of splitting working-class organizations...
...Carl Lanimuir Professor of Economics, Emeritus University oj California, Berkeley Congratulations on the excelleni reporiing from Europe by Eliahu Salpeter...
...That those measures were frustrated by sloppiness in the prison administration was not Schmidt's fault...
...pointing an accusing finger at any one country bedevilled by terrorism...
...In my "EuroVista" column of September 12, I was a little loo optimistic aboul Spain's political prisoners...
...The booklet created a sensation: It was published in three English editions as well as in French, Czech, Japanese, and Yiddish, and fhe reports of F. A. Voigt, the German correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, who established contact with Miles, were received with breathless enthusiasm abroad...
...Berkeley, Cal...
...Horst Duhnke is of course right in his remark about the implications of the British electoral system for the National Front: Britain has a constituency and not a proportional representation electoral system...
...Lastly, all four hijackers of the Lufthansa plane were Arab...
...Accused of defeatism, he saw his organization split by a "radical" current that soon looked for an alliance with the Communists...
...She cites 1,600 refugees in France who are still being helped by her organization, Spanish Refugee Aid...
...One of the very few Germans who recognized the Nazi danger—indeed the entire spectrum of totalitarianism—as early as 1929, Miles established a secret resistance organization independent of all existing parties...
...Internal strife led to denunciations, enabling the Nazis to arrest many members of New Beginning...
...This is nol ihe time for The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words...
...in fact, he has not disappeared at all, but waits for his death from cancer in the town of Soltau...
...Barcelona Ray Alan European Extremism Although in the past 1 have read with great interest Eliahu Salpeter's informative articles about the Middle East, he does not yet seem to have gained the proper perspective in his new field, Europe...
...Yet she should know that only a few years ago there were more than 160,000 Spanish refugees in France...
...Having said this, 1 hope everyone who has contributed to Spanish Refugee Aid in the past will continue to do so until the Spanish authorities can be persuaded to take responsibility for aged and ailing victims of the Franco dictatorship...
...Unlike Entebbe, there were no Germans...
...In fact, because of administrative quibbles, some remained in jail a few weeks longer...
...Belgian fascism is the only popular movement that has succeeded in bridging the language barrier," Moffett notes...
...Champaign, III...
...It was the teachers—fearing any discussion of the attitude they had taken at the time— who originally wanted to avoid bringing up the Hitler atrocities in school...
...Having had the dubious pleasure of being in Central Europe in the 1930s and '40s, 1 seem to be less complacent about such phenomena at present...
...German curricula are determined by the government, which does not want to obscure the deeds of the Nazis...
...Yet he would have a hard time proving any "deliberate deletion of the Hitler era from the school system's history curriculum...
...Moving to Germany, what I said was not that SS murderer Kappler disappeared bodily, but that he has "disappeared from public eye"—something he has accomplished thanks largely to solicitous neighbors who shield him with the same reference to his cancer cited by Landauer...
...I do not doubt it: In 1967, on an auto trip from Brussels to Waterloo, 1 found the Flemish countryside sprinkled with swastikas...
...It is the time, however, to isolate diplomatically and in any other way feasible those countries that aid and abet such practices...
...But thousands have returned...
...Now to Germany: Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's government did not "go to incredible lengths to avoid accusations of harshness toward the incarcerated terrorists...
...Some Italian papers may or may not be correct in charging that Kappler is not as ill as his wife and his neighbors claim...
...As Landauer notes, German teachers were and are reluctant to discuss the Nazi era with their pupils...
...First, while there is un doubtedly some Communist influence among agitators against nuclear sites in Germany, it does not seem fair to group them all together as "Communist-inspired 'environmentalists.'" Second, attributing the National Front's failure in Britain to win seats in Parliament to "proportional representation" is simply wrong...
...The inability of smaller parties to win seats is due in Britain, as in the U.S., lo a winner-take-all single-member district system...
...Among his early supporters were Fritz Erler, later one of the outstanding leaders of the Social Democrats in West Germany, and Henry Ehrmaun, who was to become a distinguished political scientist in the U.S...
...In fairness, this might not have been known when the article went to press...
...As for the efforts of West Germany to avoid charges of harshness toward terrorists—this was one of the more striking (and remarked upon) aspects of the affair, as everybody watching German TV and reading German papers knows...
...These matters aside, it is evident—as Salpeter points out only too well—that there is now a serious extreme Left vs...
...His article on "The Two Faces of Extremism in Europe" (NL, November 24, 1977), for example, suffers from some serious misjudgments...
...It was the manifesto of a Socialist organization operating in Germany itself, and New Beginning also became the designation of the movement...
...It is, ot course, just the other way around...
...Despite my admiration for Salpeter's "The Two Faces of Extremism in Europe," a few errors should perhaps be noted...
...In short, as 1 reported, most of those who want to return have done so...
...In contrast to the almost hysterical dispatches in the European press about the reactions to terrorism in Germany, Salpeter presents as objective a picture as one could hope for...
...But French anti-Semitism has always been widespread and close to the surface—albeit (aside from the Dreyfus period) less vituperative than the German variety even before Hitler...
...Miles (Latin for "the warrior"), whose real name was Walter Ldwenheim, was the author of "New Beginning," a pamphlet published in Czechoslovakia in October 1933...
...By the time this is published," I wrote, "all Franco's political prisoners should have been released...
...While he was practically unknown in the U.S., some New Leader readers will no doubt recall that he was one of the few men who saved the honor of the German labor movement during the darkest hours of German history...
...He sees a danger of Right-wing extremism in France, because French Jewish leaders have told him that "anti-Semitism is widespread and often close to the surface...
...he was expelled from the party in 1927...
...the Stammheim prison, from which terrorists were able to maintain contact with the abductors of Hanns-Martin Schleyer, and where three of them eventually committed suicide, is under the jurisdiction of the state of Baden-Wurttemberg (whose government is very hostile lo Schmidt...
...Finally, it is obvious that the remark about the presence of known Nazis in German public life quoted by Landauer was not my description of the situation, but of the way the French tend to present it...
...And in spite of the example of Schleyer, who indeed was an SS man, there is very little substance to Salpeter's allegation of a "glaring presence of former Nazis in Wesi German public life...
...But by now, 1 am informed, they have all been freed...
...But 1 did not accuse the Bonn authorities of such deliberate action, nor would I think it justified to do so...
...It has become evident of laic lhat terrorism is not merely a German problem...
...Adolf Sturmthal Chairman, Interdisciplinary Seminar on Economic Development and Comparative Research...
...But I am hardly alone in this...
Vol. 61 • January 1978 • No. 1
