»You Cannot Betray an Ideal …«

Goebbels` former State Secretary, Werner Naumann (1909-1982), not only held on to his political convictions after 1945, he even made an attempt to become active again under the new and radically changed conditions. Between 1950 and 1953, Naumann made efforts to »cleanse« the ideas that had been buried »in the debris of the Reich Chancellery« in order to gather supposed mass potential from the extreme right. His intention was to organise it to take on a substantial role on the West German political scene, based on a programme of neo-Nazism that had scarcely been modified. In January 1953, the British occupying forces announced that they had discovered a conspiracy between former leading Nazi officials who had succeeded in infiltrating the North Rhine-Westphalian branch of the FDP party and occupying influential positions. The project failed for two reasons: unrealistic analysis of the post-war political crisis, and a wide line of defence from political forces loyal to the constitution.

With this analysis of the Naumann affair, against the background of the balance of domestic political forces during the early 1950s, Günter Trittel opens our eyes to central political problem areas of the past, and points out that their mental factors form the basis of the process of the establishment of democracy and consolidation in West Germany.

The failed attempt at re-Nazification in the early Federal Republic of Germany by Goebbels` former State Secretary, Werner Naumann.

The Author
Günter J. Trittel, born in 1941, is a historian and holds an extraordinary professorship at the University of Göttingen.