 In meetings with politicians in the early 1950s, HIAG claimed to represent 2 million potential voters, a vast exaggeration as only 250,000 Waffen-SS veterans were living in West Germany at that time.HIAG was successful in stoking politicians' fears that millions of disaffected former soldiers would be a threat to the nascent West German democracy.That is perhaps why SPD leader Kurt Schumacher, who himself had been persecuted by the Nazis, decided to establish contact with HIAG.