Right-wing extremism

Germany battles neo-Nazi violence

Two months ago, Horst Köhler, Germany's president, congratulated Israel on its 60th birthday in a statement reiterating that Germany was aware of its responsibility for the Holocaust and remained committed to combating racism and anti-Semitism. But Germany's Jewish community has complained Berlin is not doing enough to stop frequent incidents of neo-Nazi violence against Jewish sites and ethnic minorities, which include the country's three million Muslims. We bring you a part of the article that was published in The National Newspaper on May 8


By DAVID CROSSLAND
Story from The National Newspaper
Published: May 8, 2008


Jewish leaders were outraged after Weissensee, one of Europe's largest Jewish cemeteries in Berlin, was desecrated twice last week. Vandals knocked over more than 50 headstones and some 30 ceremonial pillars, regarded by historians as a national treasure.

"This is an intolerable insult to the memory of six million victims of the Holocaust," said Charlotte Knobloch, the head of Germany's Central Council of Jews, which represents 104,000 practising Jews living in Germany. "This looks like the work of people who still subscribe to National Socialist ideology."

In 2006, the last year for which figures are available, some 14 Jewish cemeteries were vandalised by right-wing extremists, according to Germany's domestic intelligence service, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. The year before it was 30. Many Jewish sites in the country are under police guard. Attacks on Jewish property and racist assaults on ethnic minorities in general have surged in Germany - especially in the east of the country - since 1990 when West Germany unified with the former communist east. The growth in far-right violence has been blamed in part on high unemployment that followed the rapid economic collapse in the east in the 1990s, and on a lack of education about the Nazi period in the schools under the communist regime.

Assaults on people of dark skin colour have become so common that immigrant groups have labelled parts of the east as no-go areas. Official figures put the number of violent neo-Nazis at 10,400 in Germany in 2006. Half that number lives in the east, which accounts for just one-fifth of the population. Police registered 1,047 violent crimes by far-right extremists in Germany in 2006, up 9.3 per cent from 2005. Estimates for the number of people killed in racist attacks since 1990 range between 88 and 135.

Racist assaults remain so common that they rarely warrant much mention in the national media unless they are spectacular, such as a case in Aug 2007 when eight Indian men were beaten and chased through the eastern town of Mügeln by a group of Germans shouting "Foreigners Out!"

"The true crime figures are at least twice as high as the official estimates," said Prof Hajo Funke, an expert on Germany's far right at Berlin's Free University. "The authorities haven't done nearly enough to tackle the problem. Some of the regional states in eastern Germany ignored that anything was wrong for a decade and a half."

The government has increased funding for victims' support groups and education programmes to discourage young people from joining neo-Nazi groups. But the problem is not confined to young people.

"Racist attitudes remain entrenched at the heart of society in eastern Germany, among all generations," said Dominique John, project co-ordinator for Opferperspektive, a state-funded support group for victims of far-right violence. "We keep getting cases in which police don't take victims of racist violence seriously and send them home without doing anything."

The eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt last year launched a parliamentary inquiry into the region's police force following accusations that it failed to investigate racist assaults properly.

Germany has strict laws banning the public display of Nazi symbols such as the swastika, and it is a punishable offence to deny that the Holocaust happened. The government this week outlawed two far-right groups which it described as "reservoirs for organised Holocaust deniers".

"The spiritual arsonists we're tackling here are the breeding ground for racially motivated violence," said Wolfgang Schäuble, the interior minister. But despite the tough rhetoric, Chancellor Angela Merkel's government has been criticised for failing to pursue a ban of the far-right National Democratic Party, which openly espouses Nazi ideology. The NPD receives over one million euros in public funding each year because it is a legitimate party. It won enough votes to enter the regional parliaments in two of eastern Germany's five states in 2004 and 2006. Udo Voigt, the NPD chairman and a former army captain, faces trial on a charge of racial incitement. An NPD guide for party officials states that an "African, Asian or Oriental" can never become German and that members of other races will "always remain foreign bodies physically, mentally and spiritually, regardless of how long they live in Germany". NPD flags and symbols are unmistakably similar to Nazi paraphernalia, and party members are on record praising Hitler and his henchmen.

Yet Germany's mainstream political parties disagree on whether to try to outlaw the NPD because a previous attempt to ban it was rejected by Germany's highest court in 2003. The case was thrown out because some of the NPD officials called to testify were secret service informants. That tainted their testimony and made the government's case legally untenable. The failure was deeply embarrassing to the government and helped the NPD to woo supporters. It has also made Ms Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats reluctant to try again.

All contacts with NPD informants would need to be severed before a new attempt could be made, weakening surveillance of the party's activities. Besides, politicians argue that a second bid would not be sure to succeed even then. But the centre-left Social Democrats argue that the NPD is so openly unconstitutional that the security services do not need to monitor it from the inside.

"A ban of the NPD would help to strengthen the mayors in eastern German towns where the xenophobic, racist neo-Nazi party is strongly established," said Prof Funke. "Telling people that the party is unacceptable could help to establish democratic thinking in those communities."

But any fresh bid to outlaw the NPD is not expected until 2010, if at all. In the meantime, authorities are trying to cut its public funding.

The Jewish community says the delay poses risks. "People who hesitate or cite poor prospects for success as a reason are sending the wrong signals to society and recklessly endangering faith in our democracy," said Stephan Kramer, general secretary of the Central Council of Jews.


(Published: 10.07.2008.)