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JUNE 8. 1974# The Hitler Boomby Charles Lam MarkmannHeidelbergHad he lived Adolf Hitler would have been 85 years old on April 20. And it was on this April 20 that the forces responsible for the ouster of Chancellor Willy Brandt-for things must be called by their right names-had almost finished preparing West Germany for her start on the short march back to the past. One hears everywhere "If we only had a strong man again." On the fashionable North Sea resort island of Sylt, Hitler's birthday was celebrated in the best National Socialist style by several dozen Germans, none oldest 15, and all of them arrested on charges of having circulated or displayed Nazi symbols. Young men wore brown shirts and swastika arm bands; the girls frumped themselves up in the dowdy blue skirts and white middy blouses of the Bund deutscher Mädeln (League of German Girls), the auxiliary of the Hitler Jugend. The walls of the room in which they held their party were decorated with pictures of Hitler and other National Socialist emblems for which they had scoured Schleswig-Holstein. After they had listened to records of Hitler's and other Nazi leaders' speeches and of old party march music, they drank a toast to the fuhrer.When they were arrested, one of the young men said the party had been planned merely as "ein guter Gag." Perhaps so. But for millions of other Germans the re-creation of "the Nazi time" is serious business for some, because they want those good old days back, and for a few because they fear the others may very easily get their wish when the Federal Republic of Germany must at last put its democracy to the test. The fear is heightened by the steady and at times spectacular rise in what is called die Hitlerwelle-the Hitler wave, or Hitler boom-which has kept pace with the economic crisis, price levels and unemployment. The number of jobless has doubled since December.It is as much a Hitler and Hitler-associated boom as a Nazi boom. This is not to say that Nazi thinking has no following in West Germany-quite the contrary, as the letters-to-the-editor columns of newspapers demonstrate. In Bavaria-Nurnberg (indeed where else?), in a 17th-century Franconian castle, a 25-man "army" of youths trains regularly, with the same steel helmets and rifles that the Wehrmacht used from 1939 to 1945. Their leader is a sign-painter named Karl-CHARLES LAM MARKMANN, critic, translator and journalist, is at work on a book about the two German republics.Heinz Hoitmann, whose goals are simple: the destruction of communism and big capital, the end of parliamentary rule, government by an unelected elite, the annexation of Austria (which, as the Weimar Constitution makes clear in Article 61, was also the goal of the first German "republic"), and the reunification of the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic.There is a core of some 120,000 regular readers of the National Zeitung, which for two decades has been whitewashing the Nazi era, "proving" that the only concentration and extermination camps were those built after the war by German prisoners under American orders, for propaganda purposes( there are even pictures); promoting a brisk trade in Nazi medals, uniforms weapons and other memorabilia, as well as books and recordings of speeches party congresses, narrations of military campaigns (victorious one.), and engaging in a fairly subtle anti-Semitism. There is no need for blatancy, after all the Jews were only the first and most conspicuous of Nazi targets. Twelve or so million non-Jews murdered by the Germans died just as painfully-facts that are almost daily branded as "Lies" in letters to newspapers, occasionally in demonstrations, less infrequently in swastika-daubings and cemetery vandalism.But these things-the Sylt birthday party, Hoffmann's army (which ought to be taken seriously-the Nazi party's strength rose to seven members when Hitler joined it), the National Zeitung, the "antiquarians" whose windows and shops are filled exclusively with Wiheimine and especially National Socialist clichés à vertu-are only symptoms of the Hitler-welle. The real thing is far more widespread, far deeper and more "respectable": in West Berlin alone there are more than 500 cars bearing registration plates that, after the mandatory "B" (for Berlin), carry such letter combinations as SS, SA, HJ, KZ before the various numerals. These designations-for Sturmschatzstaffel (Elite Guard), Sturmabteilung (Storm Troops), Hitler Jugend, Konzentrazion-lager (concentration camp)-have not been issued routinely. They are issued by request, and Karl Koenig, the Social Democrat who heads the city's Economics Department, the issuing office, explains that under West German law such requests cannot be refused. (I am not for one moment implying that the law should be revised: one does not fight ideas, or even brute hatreds, with muzzles.) The