Karl-Heinz Priester

Karl-Heinz Priester (20 March 1912 – 16 April 1960) was a German far-right political activist. While he played only a minor role in Nazi Germany, Priester became a leading figure on the extreme right in Europe after the Second World War.

Under the Nazis A native of Hesse-Nassau, Priester joined the regiment of the Hitler Youth that covered the south of the territory in 1932. He went on to serve as head of propaganda for the Hitler Youth. He also acted as executive director of Kraft durch Freude from 1935 to 1939. He was also in attendance at the 1951 conference in Malmö that saw the foundation of the European Social Movement (ESM). Priester was an enthusiastic supporter of the idea of a united Europe although his co-operation with another leading light of that position, Oswald Mosley, was hamstrung by the stormy nature of their personal relations. A strong opponent of democracy, he would later move to have the Italian Social Movement expelled from the ESM due to their willingness to co-operate with more mainstream right-wing parties in Italy. and was a close ally of its founder Arthur Ehrhardt. The two even worked together on their shared aim of exporting the idea to South Africa, where Mosley had already secured an alliance with former cabinet minister Oswald Pirow. He was also a close collaborator of René Binet, helping him to develop his journal La Sentinelle. The Verlag also published Advance to Barbarism, an attack on the validity of the Nuremberg Trials by British Union of Fascists and Union Movement activist F.J.P. Veale, with an introduction written by another prominent critic of the trials Maurice Hankey, 1st Baron Hankey.