Strauss goes back on the offensive
Tom Bower
Munich To be powerful, ambitious, adulated by millions and yet denied office, is a frustrating predicament for any politician. For one as ambitious as Dr Franz-Josef Strauss, the leader of the Bavarian Christian Socialist Union, the last nine years in the wilderness have been all the worse because of what he calls the 'red Gotterdammerung' sweeping Germany. Now he is about to mount a new and potentially more successful challenge to the Social Democrat/Liberal governing coalition in Bonn. He has resigned from the Bundestag and is standing for election as Bavaria's minister president — in which capacity he will sit in the Upper House, the Bundesrat.
What speculation there is on the outcome of the 15 October elections concerns only the size of Strauss's majority. The Bavarian SPD gave up the fight even before it began. Their latest campaign slogan, 'stop Strauss getting two-thirds of the vote' is an indication of their loss of morale. But what alarms Strauss's enemies — and he has millions of those, too — is that if the CDU also win the state elections in Hesse on 8 October, the conservatives, with Strauss at the helm, would have the significant twothirds majority in the Upper House. Strauss might not only be able to veto any government legislation; he might also have the power to initiate changes in the constitution. He would become second only to Chancellor Schmidt as a political power broker in Bonn.
It is reported to be an even fight in Hesse but, whatever happens, Strauss has changed track for one reason only. With his sights set firmly on the general elections in 1980 and even 1984, he hopes to have found a more successful route to becoming the next conservative chancellor of West Germany. Even his glossy election handout makes it clear that at sixty-three he is still a 'young' contender. With characteristic immodesty, it underlines the fact that Churchill was sixty-six and Adenauer seventy-three before they reached the highest office.
Despite the scandals and allegations of corruption which have plagued his career, Strauss's popularity is striking. British politicians would be surprised by, and envious of, the excited anticipation which marks his election meetings. Up to four times a day, the crowds, sometimes 15,000 strong, flock to hear his rousing soapbox rhetoric: the government is run by Marxists; communist spies, aided by the SPD, take whatever secrets they want; the country is run by second-class playboy lawyers; the only good thing about the Guillaume affair was that it got rid of Brandt; it's about time people stopped looking into dusty old files to discover a pro-Nazi phrase uttered over thirty years ago. The Christian Socialist Union is a large umbrella for monarchists, catholics, separatists, nationalists, former Nazis, anti-communists, the enemies of Ostpolitik, the dispossessed from Germany's eastern territories, and for many who yearn for strict law and order policies. Strauss makes a nostalgic appeal on behalf of the old values and a powerful plea for those indus trialists who have created Germany's enormous wealth. Many support him for his attacks on those who 'try to indoctrinate our children against their families and the Church'. 'They are Marxists,' he says, and equally anyone who attacks Strauss is classed as a communist agent.
Strauss's vehement demand for a 'Schlussstrich' — a final end — into the probing of people's suspected Nazi past receives a great deal of support from the older generation. 'Don't think it was only the Germans who supported Hitler,' he told 9,000 at Russelheim, 'Chamberlain was just as keen, so was Lloyd George and even Churchill supported Hitler at the beginning.' Roars of approval. When asked later to cite Churchill's support, Strauss said that he had read it in some book or other. But, he said, he would be grateful if it could be checked. Told later that Churchill's official biographer disputed his assertion, Strauss's office remained unruffled: 'We should be glad to look over the evidence'.
In fact Strauss's own record during the Third Reich nearly became an issue in his own elections. In the wake of the Filbinger affair — Filbinger, the prime minister of Baden Wurtemberg, was forced to resign after his indelicate insistence that he 'was just obeying the law' when he condemned a young naval deserter to death just days before Germany's surrender — leftists in Bavaria's SPD publicly asked Strauss to account for his own activities. For those who have criticised Strauss for his close friendship to former Nazis, it was a golden opportunity. They produced documents to show that Strauss, although not a member of the Nazi Party (and some of Hitler's most influential supporters never were), was a member of the NSKK. The NSKK was the Party's private transport organisation and stood in the official Party hierarchy just below the SS. Further, his critics allege, Strauss was appointed a `1.1hrungs Offizier' after service on the Russian front. It was the Nazi Party's equivalent to the Communist Kommissar. According to the Party's official job description, the post could only be held by someone who was an 'absolutely reliable and fanatic Nazi'. The young Strauss would have educated officers and soldiers on the superiority of the Germans, the inferiority and danger of Communists and Jews, and the glorification of the 'thousand-year Reich'. A demanding job, especially for someone who has said that he was secretly an anti-Nazi.
With Filbinger gone, and the CDU deeply embarrassed, the call to Strauss to explain himself was launched with all the ferocity that those who have energetically pursued the politician through all his other scandals could muster. But the scent was soon lost. What was Helmut Schmidt, the CSU asked, doing as an official witness at the trial of the officers involved in the 20 July plot? For the SPD, always eager to assert their 'brownless' past, it was a little too close for comfort. Not that there was anything to hide' of course. Schmidt was ordered to go there, and requested a transfer after one day. Nevertheless, the Bavarian SPD members were advised to drop the campaign. Strauss, who has never really answered the original question, naturally claims that his critics are communist agents. 'Why is it,' he asks, 'that when a former Nazi joins the SPD he's a decent German, but when he joins the CSU, he is still a Nazi?'
The answer is that several, apparently unrepentant, former Nazis were important supporters of the CSU. Nor did it help when Strauss, in 1969, said that 'in the light of its economic achievements, Germany has the right not to be reminded any more about Auschwitz.' It was an unfortunate slip for a man who prefers not to answer specific questions on the more sensitive issues with direct answers. Carelessness has been one of Strauss's weaknesses throughout his dogged career. But with the support of friends in the right places, he has survived longer than any other German politician of *the right.
Catapulted in the three years after the War from a lowly official to general secretary of the CSU, Strauss was the protégé of the Party's founder, Dr Josef Muller. Allegedly it was he who advised on the addition of 'Josef to Strauss's name. It gave a clerical and monarchist flavour. The 'Dr' appeared some years later, although he never went to university. Significantly his support has come not only from the mass electorate but also from the very rich, many of them in the 'Bavarian Mafia'. Some are members of the Deutschland Stiftung, founded in 1964, which links directors of, for example, Siemens, Daimler Benz and the Dresdner Bank with far right groups with what many see as dangerously nationalistic objectives. Strauss is also associated with the DS. It is these contacts which gave Strauss his impressive lordliness. But, the master and manipulator in his own Bavarian parish, he became nastily unstuck when he tried to use his skills on the national stage. The alleged nepotism and lying involved in various scandals such as Lockheed Bribes and the Der Spiegel disaster undermine any of the traditional gloss which normally rest on former Ministers of Defence and Finance. The history of allegations of kick-backs, pay-offs and outright dishonesty, even though refuted by Strauss, have lost him the support of many of his coalition partners in the CDU. And not everyone sympathises with his view that he is the victim of a communist smear campaign. Despite his rotund and sometimes genial personality, few would want, or even dare to embrace him. But many do accept his programme for Germany. To remove quasi-socialist controls, return to a free market economy, de politicise education, reinforce the police and army, and above all play tough with the communist powers. He also offers the charisma which German conservative leadership has lacked since Adenauer retired. But the Strauss package contains more than an element of controversy, and it is the election to the Bundesrat which gives him a last chance to put the murkier aspects of the past behind him. Feted by monarchs, presidents and prime ministers round the world, Strauss now needs support inside Germany itself. His recurring election theme is 'Freedom or Socialism?' His enemies reply, 'Freedom or Strauss?'
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