Sweden deports six German rightwing extremists

Dec 9, 2006, 14:14 GMT

Stockholm - The Swedish authorities deported Saturday six German rightwing extremists because of 'expected criminal acts,' a police spokesman said.

The six, who travelled to Sweden to take part in a memorial march for a murdered Swedish neo-Nazi, were 'the most conspicuous' in a group of like-minded individuals from Germany and were 'previously known,' police said.

At the annual march in the town of Salem near Stockholm rightwing extremists from Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Germany remember Swedish teenager Daniel Wretstrom who was murdered by youths in December 2000, probably because of his links with a neo-Nazi group.

Neo-Nazi crime doubles in Berlin, police chief says

8 December 2006

Berlin (dpa) - The level of violent neo-Nazi crime in the German capital more than doubled over the past year, Berlin's police chief said Friday.

There were 52 reported violent neo-Nazi attacks in 2005 and this year there will be over 100, said police chief Dieter Glietsch in comments to Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

Officials are alarmed by growing neo-Nazi violence. Nationwide the level of rightist crime rose by 20 per cent during the first nine months of 2006.

"This is a new development which really fuels concern," said Glietsch.

Far-rightist parties have also won seats in three eastern German regional assemblies.

Glietsch said neo-Nazis had gained confidence following the failure to ban the rightist National Democratic of Germany (NPD) in 2003. Germany's highest court struck down a ban on the NPD which is widely viewed as the best organised of the country's far-right movements.

"Ever since then the right-wing extremists have become more aggressive and less restrained because they apparently feel safer," the Berlin police chief said.

Stressing there were limits to what police could do in the fight against rightists, Glietsch urged German politicians to find a way to ban the NPD.

Germany's domestic security agency, the Verfassungsschutz, says there are about 39,000 organised rightists in Germany - out of a total population of 82 million.

The number of reported rightist crimes in Germany rose to 15,361 in 2005, up from 12,051 in 2004, says the latest Verfassungsschutz report.

Highest levels of neo-Nazi crime on a per capita basis are in economically hard hit Eastern Germany. Saxony-Ahalt state had the largest number of rightist crimes in 2005, followed by Brandenburg and Thuringia, says the report.

Berlin was ranked ninth out of Germany's 16 Laender, the federal states.

http://www.expatica.com/actual/article.asp?subchannel_id=52&story_id=34951

Fairy-tale German town fights neo-Nazi violence

By Madeline Chambers
Reuters
Thursday, December 7, 2006; 7:49 AM

QUEDLINBURG, Germany (Reuters) - The Christmas market in this medieval German town could be off a page in a children's picture book.

The sugary smell of "Gluehwein" (mulled wine) wafts over wooden stalls selling toys and gingerbread while children sway to seasonal songs. Christmas lights illuminate the half-timbered houses around the square.

Last Saturday evening, three burly policemen stood under those fairy lights clutching truncheons.

Their job: to stop neo-Nazi violence.

Sure enough, a couple of hours later bottles started flying, a scuffle ensued and an ambulance drew up. The chatty waitress in a restaurant under Quedlinburg's town hall suddenly became flustered and locked the door, keeping her customers inside.

"Sorry, this has been happening a bit lately," she said, mentioning a neo-Nazi attack last weekend on some teenagers.

In statistics which make alarming reading given Germany's Nazi history, right wing-motivated violence is on the rise in the country as a whole and especially in the former east German state of Saxony-Anhalt.

MORE ATTACKS

The "Miteinander" (together) victim support group registered 110 right wing-motivated acts of violence in the first half of this year in Saxony-Anhalt. That was more than in any other state and compared to 129 incidents in the whole of 2005.

Police in Quedlinburg have reacted by installing video cameras, reinforced the number of officers on night duty, launched a campaign to help the community recognize politically motivated crime and are trying to react more quickly when incidents occur.

"The aim is to get quick convictions for perpetrators," said a police spokesman. He said the far-right scene was not well-organized and police know the individuals involved.

The UNESCO world heritage site of Quedlinburg counts as one of Germany's prettiest towns. According to folklore, the nearby Harz mountain range is home to witches and woodland spirits.

But during the day, it is the neo-Nazis who make their presence felt.

Hanging around the square, they are recognizable by their skinhead haircuts, military clothing with far-right slogans like "Stahlgewitter" (storm of steel) and Burberry caps.

Recent incidents in the region include a teenager who was forced to wear a sign saying he was a Jew, a punk rock fan who lost an eye after being beaten and the well-documented burning of the diary of Holocaust victim Anne Frank in July.

Statistics show racist attacks are rife in Saxony-Anhalt where unemployment was about 16.5 percent in October compared with 9.8 percent in Germany as a whole.

Non-German faces are noticeable by their absence.

INSTITUTIONAL PROBLEM

In the country overall, the number of extreme right wing crimes jumped 20 percent in the first eight months of 2006.

Germany needs to confront its right-wing culture because it is an institutional problem, says Miteinander's Heike Kleffner.

"The extreme right's prejudices and hatred of minorities mirrors the prejudices of some of the wider population," said Kleffner, head of the organization's mobile victim support unit.

Police and prosecutors are slow to bring cases to court and some judges refuse to identify right wing militancy even when they see neo-Nazi emblems tattooed on criminals, she said. Conviction rates remain low in Saxony-Anhalt.

"A mix of helplessness, ignorance, unprofessional behavior and prejudice means the problem is talked down. That leads to the growing self-confidence of the far right," Kleffner said.

Individual incidents are reported in local media but the problem tends to get wider attention only occasionally or when the National Democratic Party (NPD) makes electoral gains, as it did in September in the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

The NPD has seats in three state parliaments and 9,000 members, and it campaigns on euphemisms like defending German cultural heritage. Followers praise some Nazi policies and back Iran's president who says Israel should be wiped off the map.

Some politicians want to try again to ban the NPD after an attempt failed in 2003 because some of the testimony came from government informants within the party.

"The NPD ... are against democracy and are racist," Social Democrat lawmaker Sebastian Edathy said this week. "They don't respect fundamental human rights as they are described in the constitution and I think that is reason enough to ban (it)."

Others say a ban would not eliminate the underlying problem and note most young neo-Nazi militants are not NPD members but belong to social groups called "Kameradschaften."

"We don't need new laws, we need the current ones to be implemented properly," said Kleffner.

(Additional reporting by Tom Armitage)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/07/AR2006120700397.html

Rick Steves' Europe
A haunting visit to Dachau, the Nazi concentration camp

Monument at Dachau: Forgive, but never forget.

With each visit to the Dachau, site of the infamous Nazi concentration camp, I remember a chance contact I had with a German woman who called the Gernamn town home.

Riding the city bus from Munich to Dachau, I sat awkwardly next to the old woman. I smiled at her weakly as if to say, "I don't hold your people's genocidal atrocities against you."

She glanced at me and sneered down at my camera. Suddenly, surprising me with her crusty but fluent English, she ripped into me.

"You tourists come here not to learn but to hate," she seethed.

Pulling the loose skin down from a once-strong upper arm, she displayed a two-sided scar. "When I was a girl, a bullet cut straight through my arm," she said. "Another bullet killed my father. The war took many good people. My father ran a Gruss Gott shop."

I was stunned by her rage. But I sensed her desperation to unload her story on one of the hordes of tourists who tramp daily through her town to ogle at an icon of the Holocaust. I asked, "What do you mean, a Gruss Gott shop?"

She explained that in Bavaria, shopkeepers greet customers by saying, "Gruss Gott" (which means roughly "praise God"). During the Third Reich it was safer to change the greeting to "Sieg Heil." It was a hard choice. And each shopkeeper had to make it. Everyone in Dachau knew which shops were Gruss Gott shops and which were Sieg Heil shops.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/traveloutdoors/2003466234_websteves10.html

Nazi claims and sex scandal threaten Polish government

Last week another Polish paper published pictures of a meeting of the League of Polish Families - an extreme right junior coalition partner led by the education minister, Roman Giertych - featuring swastikas and Sieg Heil chants. The revelations provoked outrage in the country that was invaded first by the Nazis and where six million were killed in the war.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1968078,00.html