Bruderschaft and Naumann Circle
In Hamburg on 22 July 1949, former high-ranking National Socialist functionaries under the chairmanship of ex-Gauleiter Karl Kaufmann founded the Bruderschaft, with just under two hundred members. Its plan was to appoint covert National Socialists to key positions in all areas of public life.
The Bruderschaft maintained close ties with the Naumann Circle. In 1944/45, Werner Naumann had been appointed the personal aide and deputy of National Socialist Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels. In the early 1950s, he organised a network of National Socialists to infiltrate the Free Democratic Party (FDP) in North Rhine-Westphalia. The aim was to take power in the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1953, British investigators arrested eight of the conspirators, including four from Hamburg.
Four of the conspirators were arrested in Hamburg: Karl Kaufmann (top left); Dr Gustav Scheel, former Gauleiter of Salzburg (top right); Dr Heinrich Haselmeyer, former leader of the National Socialist German Students’ League in Hamburg (bottom left); and Dr Karl Scharping, former staff member of the National Socialist Propaganda Ministry (not shown).
‘Whether we can succeed ultimately in transforming a liberal party into a Nazi combat group or in operating in a pan-German way with a federalist community remains to be seen; in any case we need to give it a try. If the FDP did not exist, it would have to be founded right now, today.’
Werner Naumann in a speech to former Nazi functionaries in Hamburg, 18 November 1952
The men were handed over to the German authorities for sentencing. However the Federal Court of Justice dismissed the proceedings. While Karl Kaufmann did not resurface politically following his release, Naumann ran as a candidate for the extreme right-wing Deutsche Reichspartei (DRP) in the Bundestag parliamentary elections in 1953.
‘[It would be] foolish to assume that Nazism could not, under any circumstances, rise again in modern Germany, even in a different form.’
British High Commissioner Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick in his memoirs, published in 1959
