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# JUNE 8, 1974.which, after some initial successes, took cover in the hardly inhospitable Christian Democratic and Christian Social Uhions but has recently announced its determination to purge itself of this taipt." In addition in spite of the constitutional ban (Article, 18) on on any use of civil liberties to endanger the undetined free democratic basic order," the state of Lower Saxony alone has 34 active Fascist and Nazi organizations, publishing houses, and mail-order book distributors. No one knows how many members and customers they have because they operate furtively, as the rather stupid law compels them to dó Mut (Courage), a monthly magazine addressing a frankly Fascist if not Nazi program to the young in that state, has a circulation of 10.00%) and is regarded by the Lower Saxon Minister of the Interior as potentially or latently dangerous.Everywhere there is curiosity about those mysterious 12 years. The teachers who taught then are stiil teaching, unless superannuated, but very few of them dare to teach what they used to teach, or even to talk about "the past." That is why Das drifte Rech was founded this year: to make money out of that curiosity. The idea was that of Hans-Peter Dietze, now its managing editor, according to his editor-in-chief, Dr. Christian Zentner, who stakes, a pious claun to a de-site to show his young compatriots how the Third Reich carne to pass. in order to prevent its ever happening again. After four issues, Dr. Zentner is not so sure that his publisher, the big Hamburg house of John Jahr Verlag KG, will do much more than break even, because, he told me, what millions of people are insatiably interested in is not "the abstractions" of nazism and its history but its personalities, and in particular Adolf Hitler. These, he says, are "simple" people who do not read books but who watch television and read magazines, and it was they whom he set out to capture to clarify the past for them.His magazine is expensive - about $1.50 a copy. A tremendous advertising campaign, of dubious taste, resulted in first-issue sales some 150,000 above the 250.000 copies that the editors and publishers expected. The second issue sold between 330 000 and 340.000 copies, the third something over 250,000 so far, and the fourth-which is still on the newsstands-more than 200,000. The overwhelming majority of the purchasers and subscribers, Zentner admits, seems to include few of those young people he was looking for. the real circulation is among the people old enough to remember, the Nazis who write furious letters to the editor because he tarnishes their legends. Both Dietze and Zentner fold me that the greatest sales of Das dritte Reich are not in cities but out in the country and the small towns, in Bavaria and Franconia especially. One of the reasons for the phenomenal success of a television program called "Ein Herz und eine Seele" ("One Heart and One Soul") is its enthusiastically en-19joyed derogations of the sub-men, by name: the Slavs, the lows, the Latins, the Levantines A German exaggeration ot "All-in the Fantily, the program plays also on the hysterical dread of the Communists" that has been endemic here ever since the general staft realized in 1915 that it had made a terrible mistake in helping Lenin in 1917. Ex-Chancellor Willy Brandt Br was a constant target because of his illegitimate birth and his "traitorous" conduct from 1935 to 1915, when he fought against nazism, as well as bis "selling out" to "the Reds." The program regularly attracts 60-65 percent of the national audience, and only an occasional editorial writer or commentator dates to see its popularity for the darger it is. Its "lett-liberal" creator, Wolfgang Menge, claims it to be a satire and so recognized because people say its protagonist, Altred Tetzlaff, sounds just like Franz Josef Strauss, the head of. the CSU: but then in each regional election this year more of them vote for the Strausses.In mid-March the Bavarian State Radio and Television broadcast a long interview with Hitler's (and Franklin Roosevelt'sa old thiend, Ernst (l'utzi) Hanf-staengl, who is now S. Though in the end-through a rather gruesome practical joke-he felt he had to lee to the United States in 1997, and was malenalty as-sisted by Roosevelt, his old Harvard classmate, in gaining entay (later he became an adviser on policy to the American forces!). Hanfstaengl spent his whole tume on camera telling what ime fellows Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, Himader and the others really were, when all was said and done-and masters of their trades to boct: firne solchets, gentuses at propaganda, und so weiter. Their Weimar predecessors he belittled and dismissed as nothings, though he admitted he had never known much about their aspirations or their achievements. Moreover in spite of having, with his wife and sister. lavishly and almost single. mindedly supported Hitler from the days before the 1923 Munchen. Pres to his own abrupt departure for the decadent democracy, ifentataengl insisted that he had never thought tot a moment that the umemitting vuulent anti-Semitis. ot his friend and hato would ever amount to anything serious ("some of my best friends were..."). o tinut his protege would ever have been "stupra enough to start a war "The real danger et a Ruler renascence, in the view of Dr. Hugs Mare, a scholar who surfered under the original, lies in the combination of a tomanne nostalgia and the millenn German taith in authoritanan rule as the solution to all problems Weimar, atter all, failed primanly, as both William B. Shirer and Karl Dietrich Bracher have shown, because no one, including the Social Democrats who proclaimed it out of desperation when they could find neither a Hohen-zollern nor any other royalty to accept the throne, wanted a repubis. When the economic crash came after 1929, the millennial search for the "strong man" lost its last restraint.