Chancellor candidate sues paper over Nazi charge

March 1, 1983

West Germany's Hans-Jochen Vogel took legal action against a right-wing newspaper that alleged he had been a leading officer in the Nazi Hitler Youth organization.

Mr. Vogel, the opposition Social Democrat candidate for chancellor, applied for an injunction to prevent the Bild am Sonntag newspaper from repeating its charges and to force it to print a rebuttal, a party statement said. Meanwhile, former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, a Social Democrat himself, ended his virtual silence in the general-election campaign to make a sharp attack on Chancellor Helmut Kohl, a Christian Democrat. A central issue in the campaign is West Germany's economic recession (see page 12).