Naumann lived in the
Soviet occupation zone and apprenticed as a mason. He was about to join the
Socialist Unity Party and become chair of a commission for liquidating private property in summer 1946. Instead, he left for western Germany in 1946, and worked as a farmhand and bricklayer in
Tübingen and
Frankfurt. He lived under an assumed name for five years, but reemerged in early 1950 after an
amnesty law had taken effect, and became the manager of an import-export company in
Düsseldorf. Naumann soon began making contact with other former Nazi functionaries politically active on the far-right, including
Hans-Ulrich Rudel,
Ernst Achenbach, Artur Axmann,
Otto Skorzeny and many others. This group came to be known as the
Naumann Circle (
Naumann-Kreis) or the
Gauleiter Circle. Achenbach stated that the group could make Naumann secretary general of the
Free Democratic Party (FDP) in North Rhine-Westphalia with only 200 infiltrators. They infiltrated the FDP for a period of about two years. Naumann, together with six co-conspirators, was arrested by the
British Army on 15 January 1953 for being the leader of a
Neo-Nazi group that attempted to infiltrate
West German political parties. Naumann was turned over to the German authorities on 1 April and, after over six months in custody, was released from pre-trial detention on 28 July 1953 by a decision of the
Federal Constitutional Court at
Karlsruhe. On 5 August 1953, barely a week after his release, Naumann declared his intention to run for a seat in the
Bundestag as a candidate of the right-wing
Deutsche Reichspartei (DRP), which had benefited heavily from the banning of the
Socialist Reich Party the previous year. However, on 23 August, just two weeks before the election, the state government of North Rhine-Westphalia, acting as a
denazification tribunal, classified him as a Category II offender. As such, he was prohibited from belonging to any political party, engaging in any political activity, holding any political office, or working as an author, journalist or broadcaster for a period of five years. His
Bundestag candidacy was thus abruptly ended. The criminal investigation continued and, at its conclusion on 29 June 1954, the German prosecutors determined that there was sufficient evidence to proceed with a prosecution of Naumann on charges of leading an unconstitutional organization. However, just over five months later, on 3 December 1954, the criminal court in Karlsruhe found that the evidence did not support the charge and the criminal proceedings were dismissed. On 23 September 1955, just over two years after the imposition of the 5-year political and civil prohibitions against Naumann, they were lifted by the government of North Rhine-Westphalia, which determined that after the formal ending of the Allied occupation, the
Allied Control Council directives that had vested the denazification authority in the state government were now deprived of effect. Naumann joined the board of directors for an electronics company in
Düren owned by
Harald Quandt, the stepson of Goebbels. Naumann's book
Nau Nau gefährdet das Empire? was published by Dürer Verlag in 1953. Naumann died in 1982 in Lüdenscheid,
West Germany, aged 73. He was buried in the Kommunal cemetery of Piepersloh, Werkhagener Strasse, in Lüdenscheid. == See also ==