Most West Germans Ignore Hitler’s Anniversary

The 100th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s birth passed without feared violence in West Germany on Thursday, although police reported that they arrested more than 50 people on related minor offenses.

Almost all West Germans and Austrians ignored the date, including residents of Braunau, Austria, where the Nazi dictator was born April 20, 1889. Austrian police collaborated with West German authorities to seal off the border town in order to prevent any demonstrations there by neo-Nazis or a turnout by anti-Nazis.

Braunau Mayor Gerhard Skiba earlier this month ordered a granite monument commemorating Hitler’s victims placed outside the dictator’s birthplace, which still stands. Hitler’s parents moved away when he was an infant and never returned there to live.

Storefronts were shuttered as many Braunau shops closed for the day but no serious incidents took place, though an American and five Italians were detained after giving a straight-armed Nazi salute in front of the house.

The only political group to note the anniversary was the Austrian Greens environmental party, which declared in a statement: “Adolf Hitler is part of Austrian history, of our mothers and fathers, or our grandmothers and grandfathers. That can not be denied.

“This day should remind us how easily human beings became fanatical fighters, virulent racists, passive tools of horror and both victims of blindness and willing accomplices.”

In West Germany, more than 50 people were held for various actions--including three men for painting Nazi swastikas on subway train seats in Hamburg and young leftists wielding clubs and knives who were apparently looking for Nazi sympathizers, police said.

Widespread rumors of violence spurred police into guarding Jewish community buildings and cemeteries in various cities and stepping up patrols in neighborhoods with large numbers of foreigners.

In Bavaria, a giant swastika made from logs was set afire late Wednesday night in the Alps and blazed for 90 minutes. In Hamburg, police confiscated leaflets decorated with swastikas and warning of a “second Kristallnacht,” the 1938 pogrom against the Jews. The leaflets also said foreign children would be driven from German schools.

From Pretoria, South Africa, United Press International quoted a spokesman at the West German Embassy as saying that vandals there had painted a swastika, a Star of David and the words “Death and Hate” on the embassy’s compound wall. The spokesman said he believes right-wingers were behind the incident.

“We are washing it down,” UPI quoted him as saying. ‘Only politically and mentally insane people would do such a thing.”