The German Series #23 - Otto Strasser

Yes, there are German beret-wearers on the "wrong side" as well. Otto Johann Maximilian Strasser (1897 – 1974) was a German politician and member of the National Socialist German Workers Party. Otto Strasser, together with his brother Gregor Strasser, was a leading member of the party's left-wing faction, and broke from the party due to disputes with the ‘Hitlerite’ faction. He formed the Black Front, a group intended to split the Nazi Party and take it from the grasp of Hitler. This group also functioned during his exile and World War II as a secret opposition group.

Strasser lived in exile in Austria, Chechoslovakia, Switzerland, France and during WWII via Portugal and Bermuda, managed to get to Canada (becoming the infamous "Prisoner of Ottawa").

 Otto Strasser returns to Germany, 1955. By Joe Gromelski

As an influential and uncondemned former Nazi Party member still faithful to many doctrines of National Socialism, he was prevented from returning to West Germany after the war, first by the Allied powers and then by the West German government.

He was allowed to return to Germany in 1955 by a ruling of the Federal Administrative Court and regained his citizenship settling in Munich. He attempted to create his own, new, "nationalist and socialist"-oriented party in 1956, the German Social Union (often called a successor to the 1949-1952 forbidden Socialist Reich Party of Germany), but it was unable to attract support. For the rest of his life, Strasser continued to call for and propagate neo-Nazism until his death in Munich in 1974.