The September 1998 general election produced an unexpectedly large victory for the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, Social Democratic Party of Germany), led by Gerhard Schröder. The result was significantly influenced by voters in the former East Germany, where unemployment (and political extremism) are more acute problems than in the western Länder . Despite the unexpected success of the Deutsche Volksunion in the Saxony-Anhalt state election in April 1998, none of the three far-right parties which contested the election - the Deutsche Volksunion, Die Republikaner and the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands - was able to obtain parliamentary representation. Although seeking to capitalize on a degree of popular anti-foreigner sentiment and growing unemployment, far-right parties in Germany remain unable to make substantial progress owing, in large part, to strengthened anti-racist legislation and rigorous action on the part of the law-enforcement authorities.
Notwithstanding the lack of parliamentary success of the far-right parties, the number of crimes committed by German far-right activists in 1997 was at its highest level since 1945. In regard to antisemitic incidents, there were 965 such cases compared with the figure of 817 reported in 1996.
The public dispute over the proposed construction of a Holocaust
memorial in Berlin, a project begun a decade ago, continues. Conceived as a brainchild of
then Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the project has run into serious difficulties both on account
of the designs submitted, which many believe cannot do aesthetic justice to the Holocaust,
and the contention that such a construction will inevitably prove a focus of attention for
right-wing extremists.
Demographic data
Total population: 81.8 million
Jewish population: 68,175, mainly in Berlin (figure supplied by German Jewish community, May 1998)
Other minority groups: registered non-German immigrants comprise 7.3 million (9 per cent) of the population, including 2.5 million Turks, 1.3 million from ex-Yugoslav republics, 570,000 Italians, 360,000 Greeks, 270,000 Poles, 130,000 Romanians
Religion: 45 per cent of the population belong to the Protestant
Evangelical Church, 37 per cent are Catholics, 2.17 per cent are Muslims.
Political data
Political system: federal parliamentary democracy
Head of state: President Roman Herzog
Government and major political parties: the 27 September 1998 general election saw a swing to the left, especially among voters in the former East Germany, removing the right-of-centre coalition of the Christlich-Demokratische Union (CDU, Christian Democratic Union), its Bavarian sister party, the Christlich-Soziale Union (CSU, Christian Social Union) and their junior partner, the Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP, Free Democratic Party), as well as unseating Helmut Kohl after sixteen years in power, the first time in post-war German history that an incumbent chancellor has been defeated. The new government, a coalition of the SPD and Die Grünen (Greens), is headed by Gerhard Schröder (SPD).
The SDP emerged as Germany's biggest party with 40.9 per cent of the vote, up from 36.4 per cent in 1994. Helmut Kohl's CDU crashed to its biggest defeat since 1949 with 35.2 per cent (41.4 per cent in 1994). The FDP obtained 8.8 per cent of the vote, Greens 6.7 per cent, the reform-communist Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus (PDS, Party of Democratic Socialism) 5.1 per cent. The three far-right parties - the REP, DVU and NPD (see Parties, organizations, movements) - failed to secure any parliamentary representation. Their share of the vote was 3.3 per cent overall: REP 1.8 per cent, DVU 1.2 per cent, NPD 0.3 per cent. In the former East German states, the DVU emerged as the strongest of the far-right parties with 2.8 per cent of votes cast.
Seat allocation in the new Bundestag (669 seats):
SPD 293
CDU/CSU 245
Greens 47
FDP 44
PDS 35
Economic data
GDP: DM3.74 trillion (US$2.34 trillion) (June 1998)
GDP per head: US$30,300 (June 1998)
GDP growth: 2 per cent (June 1998)
Inflation: 2 per cent (June 1998)
Unemployment: 4.67 million (12 per cent of labour force) (June 1998)
Currency: US$1=DM1.60 (June 1998)
Modern German antisemitism developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, but it built on a long tradition of Judeophobia in Christian Europe, and can claim theological sanction in the writings of Martin Luther who demonized Jews and Judaism in a series of polemics.
The term 'antisemitism' was first coined by the German political activist Wilhelm Marr in 1879. Its rapid adoption reflected widespread recognition of the emergence of a new, more ideological and active hostility towards Jews following the unification of Germany.
Antisemitism in Germany before the First World War involved a rejection of liberalism, modernism and Jewish emancipation, and was closely connected to the growth of German nationalism and racism. Economic insecurities attendant upon the rapid industrialization of Germany further encouraged the formation of antisemitic political parties and organizations, which served to radicalize mainstream German conservatism and to make antisemitic views more respectable in official circles.
In the early twentieth century the conservative elites of the German Kaiserreich were both antisemitic and highly suspicious of the Weimar Republic. They did not accept any responsibility for Germany's defeat in the First World War, which they explained as an act of, among other things, 'Jewish betrayal'. In addition they saw the November revolution of 1918 as a 'Jewish conspiracy'.
Influential people within the political and economic elite offered no resistance to the plethora of völkisch, militaristic and anti-democratic movements that found, in Germany's domestic problems and the world economic crisis of the 1920s and 1930s, a favourable environment. In 1933 Hitler's Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP, German National Socialist Workers' Party) was seen by some to offer a solution to Germany's economic and political crisis. Some did not take the NSDAP's radical antisemitic programme seriously; others sympathized with a fundamental 'solution to the Jewish question'.
Immediately after gaining power, the NSDAP government began to put its antisemitic programme into effect. German Jews faced discrimination in stages. Their exclusion from public service and the boycott of Jewish businesses limited their economic existence, while an 'Aryanization' programme removed their property rights; with the 1935 Nuremberg Laws they lost their civil rights. Increasingly restrictive legislation drove them into social isolation or emigration. The November 1938 pogrom (Kristallnacht) added the public use of force to legislative discrimination.
The first murders of Polish Jews occurred soon after the German occupation of Poland. From February 1940 onwards Jews were deported from Reich territory to occupied Poland, where the Jewish population was placed in ghettos. Before the start of the Russian campaign, Einsatzgruppen were formed which, from the summer of 1941, began the systematic murder of Jews. From the autumn of 1941 this programme of murder was carried out through gassing facilities especially created for the purpose in death camps. The Wannsee Conference of January 1941 served to co-ordinate the eradication of European Jewry. By 1945, 6 million Jews had been killed.
Following the defeat of the Third Reich, the Allies sought to eliminate racism and antisemitism in the Federal Republic of Germany. The newly established democratic parties also pursued this policy. From 1960 onwards anti-Jewish incitement became a criminal offence. In 1985 denial of the Holocaust was criminalized. In 1995 the law determined that denial no longer needed to be an offence against the dignity of man for it to constitute a punishable act. Today, antisemitism in what was the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) exists both as a personal prejudice (as shown by opinion polls) and in an organized form on the political far right.
In the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), racism and antisemitism were officially seen as having been 'stamped out' by the introduction of socialism. Following a brief period of 'political cleansing', responsibility for the crimes of the Third Reich was placed on the Federal Republic. In the early 1960s, in an attempt to discredit the FRG, the GDR security service organized an antisemitic campaign there (e.g. during the Eichmann trial). Despite the policy of anti-fascism, far-right and antisemitic groups began to appear in the early 1980s. The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 led to an interchange of far-rightists between east and west, and the subsequent freedom of reporting brought the existence of extremism in the GDR to the world's attention.
A ban on far-right parties, together with the arrest of leading
neo-Nazis and activists, has largely denied the far right in reunified Germany a public
forum. While the registered DVU, financed by the Bavarian millionaire Gerhard Frey, scored
an unexpected success in the April 1998 Saxony-Anhalt state election, that success was
largely wiped out by its failure, and that of the other registered far-right parties (REP,
NPD) to gain any parliamentary representation in the September 1998 elections.
The impassioned public debate over the proposed construction of a Holocaust memorial in Berlin, a project begun by Chancellor Kohl a decade ago, continues. The project remains in serious difficulties both on account of the designs submitted, which many believe cannot do aesthetic justice to the Holocaust, and the contention that such a construction will inevitably prove a focus of attention for right-wing extremists. Particular passion was aroused when Jewish leader Ignatz Bubis clashed with Martin Walser, a prominent writer who questioned how long Germany should bear its 'Auschwitz legacy'. A proposal put forward by Minister of Culture Michael Naumann for a redesigned memorial incorporating a museum has won considerable support, but the issue remains unresolved.
Vernichtungskrieg - Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941-1944 (War of Extermination - Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941-1944), the exhibition documenting war-time crimes committed by the Wehrmacht, has continued to arouse controversy and to be a focal point for far-right activists (see Parties, organizations, movements). The exhibition opened in Hamburg in 1995 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war, and has since toured German and Austrian cities (see Austria). It provides evidence of how ordinary German soldiers took part in the mass executions of Jews and other civilians in Russia, Poland and Yugoslavia, and has dealt a severe blow to the conventional post-war view that the German military had nothing to do with the Holocaust, which was, it is alleged, largely carried out by the NSDAP, the Gestapo, the SS and other elite security units.
The Bavarian authorities are going ahead with the planned development of the site of Hitler's alpine retreat, the 'Eagle's Nest'. Plans for development include hotels and sports facilities but also a historical documentation centre focusing on Nazi atrocities. A Bavarian government spokesperson said: 'The state remains the owner of the entire property precisely for that reason - to prevent the mountain from becoming a site of pilgrimage.' (In November 1997 the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center had warned that the plan could 'be perceived as a banalization of Nazi crimes and create a magnet for neo-Nazis from around the world'.)
In March 1997, following a seven-year investigation, state prosecutors in Meiningen, Türingia, issued an indictment for murder against seventy-nine-year-old Louise Danz, a former SS guard from the eastern German village of Walldorf. In what may be Germany's last Nazi war crimes prosecution, Danz was expected to face trial for the murder of a young girl in a concentration camp in the final weeks of the war.
In May 1997 the magazine Der Spiegel reported that German prosecutors were still investigating hundreds of suspected war criminals, most of them in their eighties and nineties. Willi Dressen, the new head of the Ludwigsburg-based Zentrale Stelle zur Erforschung nationalsozialistischer Gewaltverbrechen (Centre for the Investigation of National Socialist War Crimes), told the magazine that about twenty-five preliminary cases which listed hundreds of suspects were still pending.
On 25 November 1997 Ernst Hering, seventy-five, a former member of a Nazi paramilitary unit, went on trial in Cologne. He was accused of standing guard while colleagues gunned down about sixty-five Jews, many of them children, in a Ukrainian village in 1942.
On 3 March 1998 Alfons Goetzfried, a seventy-eight-year-old former Nazi
officer who admitted personally shooting 500 Jews in the Majdanek concentration camp in
1942-3, was arrested at his home in Stuttgart. He was also accused of being an accessory
to 70,000 murders at Majdanek.
For more information on xenophobic attacks, see Parties, organizations, movements and Legal matters.
Violence and harassment against foreigners continue. The perpetrators of anti-foreigner violence are mainly young, male and of low socio-economic status, often acting spontaneously and under the influence of alcohol. Some offences are committed by far-right activists, such as neo-Nazis and skinheads.
There continue to be allegations of excessive use of force by the police, particularly against foreigners. In July 1997 Amnesty International published a report which found a 'continuing pattern of police ill-treatment' largely affecting foreigners.
Asylum applications continue to decline. In the first half of 1997 Germany received 52,588 applications for asylum and had a recognition rate of 11.4 per cent for the 90,922 cases concluded. Since July 1993, when the criteria for granting asylum were tightened with an amendment to the asylum law, the overall trend in asylum applications has continued downward, decreasing by two-thirds from the 1992 all-time high of 438,191.
May 1997 saw the beginning of the 'second phase' of Bosnian refugee repatriations, under which all remaining refugees were to return home unless they qualified for an extension of stay on certain humanitarian grounds. By the end of the year an estimated 100,000 refugees had voluntarily returned to Bosnia and around 900 had been deported by the state authorities.
In December 1997 Cornelia Schmalz-Jacobsen, the commissioner for foreigners, presented her annual report on the conditions experienced by Germany's 7.3 million registered foreigners. She reported 2,323 xenophobic crimes in 1996 and said the figures for 1997 would be no better. She stated that neo-Nazis had set up 'liberated zones' in at least twenty-five towns and cities in Germany, barring foreigners from clubs, cafés, bars, discos and even entire streets.
On 27 March 1998 the government rejected a major revision of Germany's
citizenship laws. It voted down a proposal by the opposition SDP to allow third-generation
immigrants born in Germany to hold two passports until the age of sixteen and then to
choose either German nationality or that of their parents. Germany has consistently
resisted efforts to alter its strict citizenship law dating back to a 1913 imperial edict
that bases nationality on blood lines rather than birthplace.
Figures issued by the German police at the beginning of 1998 hold that there are some 37,000 members of far-right parties, 6,400 neo-Nazi skinheads prepared to use violence and 2,600 skinheads who are not necessarily violent. The cumulative figure of 47,000 far-right sympathizers shows a rise of 4.5 per cent on figures for 1996. Parts of eastern Germany are said to have become no-go areas for foreigners, homosexuals or anyone considered 'unGerman'.
In January 1998 German criminologist Berndt Wagner, who has monitored the far right for ten years, warned that at least one-third of young people in the former East Germany identified with the far right. He described far-right views among Germans aged under thirty living in that part of the country as 'the norm'.
The annual report of the Bundesamt für Verfassungschutz (BfV, Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution), released in May 1998, found that crimes committed by far-right agitators in 1997 had risen to their highest level since the Second World War. A total of 11,719 far-right crimes had been committed in 1997. Of these, 790 involved violent crime, an increase of 27 per cent on the 1996 figures. The report also estimated that some 48,500 Germans identified politically with the far right and that about 15 per cent of these had indicated a readiness to use violence to advance their cause.
The German interior minister, Manfred Kanther, said that distribution of propaganda material accounted for 88 per cent of the recorded far-right offences. The report said that membership of far-right parties had grown by about 1,300 over the past year, with most new recruits coming from the former East Germany.
The report found that extremist organizations were adopting new tactics and methods of dissemination. Also apparent was an 'intellectualization' that blurred the frontiers between conservative ideas and extremist ideology, in an attempt to 'relieve the National Socialist system of its guilt'. There was also evidence of a renewed enthusiasm for Holocaust-denial propaganda. The report predicted that the Internet would come to have 'considerable' significance in the dissemination of far-right propaganda.
Parliamentary far-right parties
Many German opinion researchers agree that a large number of the voters (actual or potential) for far-right parties do not necessarily support those parties' positions but use them to express their political alienation and their anger over unemployment.
Gerhard Frey, the leader and founder of the Deutsche Volksunion (DVU, German People's Union), is a publisher with a personal fortune estimated at DM480 million (US$300 million). Born in northern Bavaria in 1933 to a wealthy merchant family, he obtained a law degree and a PhD in political science.
As a young man, Frey worked as a freelancer for the far-right Munich weekly Deutsche Soldatenzeitung, which he bought in the late 1950s when it was financially ailing. Frey renamed it the Deutsche Nationalzeitung and set up another weekly tabloid, the Deutsche Wochen Zeitung. Together, these publications became the flagships of his publishing and mail-order business for far-right books, videotapes, CDs and medallions. Estimates of the two weeklies' combined circulation range from 50,000 to 200,000 (see Publications and media).
Frey's newspapers contain a mixture of racism and antisemitism, and include Holocaust-denial themes. His books bear titles such as 'The Truth about the Wehrmacht', 'Uniforms of the Waffen SS' and 'Concentration Camp Lies: A Response to Goldhagen'. A series of videos entitled 'Hitler's Political Generals' is also for sale. The Nazi version of Deutschland über Alles on CD is advertised next to flags, maps of pre-1945 Germany and medals commemorating Nazi generals.
Frey's publications walk a fine line to avoid violating stiff German laws against incitement and Holocaust denial. He has won many legal battles. In 1974, for example, the federal government petitioned the constitutional court to strip him of his constitutional rights, including that of free speech, on the basis that he had forfeited them by using them in opposition to freedom and democracy. The court rejected the petition, claiming that it lacked sufficient legal basis.
In addition to his publishing and commercial activities, Frey became more visibly active in politics in the late 1980s. In 1987 he transformed the DVU, which was originally founded in Munich in the early 1970s as an 'association', into a political party. The DVU is entirely dependent on Frey's money. He runs the DVU as a 'one-man show', refusing to tolerate any leaders besides himself. Domestic intelligence currently estimates the party's membership at some 15,000 but Frey claims higher figures. The organization is experiencing a fall in membership, which was estimated at 20,000 in 1995.
In September 1997 the DVU increased its strength in the Hamburg municipal elections. The party was 238 votes short of meeting the 5 per cent cut-off. Its success was apparently at the expense of the FDP, which failed to reach the cut-off, and the SDP, whose declining support caused the SDP mayor of Hamburg to resign. Some analysts viewed the DVU's success as a warning to the mainstream parties to take action to reduce Germany's high unemployment rate. Chancellor Kohl noted that, although the DVU made gains in Hamburg, the overall right-wing vote was lower than in the past.
On 26 April 1998 the DVU received 12.9 per cent of the vote, the largest share won by a far-right party in any state election since the Second World War. It obtained sixteen seats in the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt. Chancellor Kohl's CDU captured just 22 per cent of the vote, barely ahead of the reformed communists. The opposition SDP emerged victorious with about 37 per cent of votes cast. The DVU's entry into the Saxony-Anhalt parliament shocked the country, and sent a clear signal that frustration over record unemployment was feeding radicalism in the East. It appears that antisemitism played little or no role in the DVU's campaign.
During the election campaign DVU posters bearing the message 'Germany for Germans!' and 'Criminal foreigners out!' were to be seen on every street corner of Magdeburg, the state capital. Posters also urged that foreign schoolchildren should not be allowed to attend German schools and that all social welfare spending should be directed only for 'German purposes'. Saxony-Anhalt has the highest unemployment rate in Germany (23.4 per cent) and the lowest growth. Immigrants form only 1.9 per cent of the state's population, one of the lowest proportions in Germany.
The DVU held no election meetings during the campaign and its candidates stayed in the shadows. An analysis of the votes cast indicates that a quarter of the 18-24 age group voted for the DVU, as did 17 per cent of those aged 25 to 34. The DVU's success owed much to its appeal to voters who previously supported Chancellor Kohl's party, which suffered a 12-point drop, gaining only 23 per cent of the vote. Chancellor Kohl described the DVU as 'completely unacceptable' and attributed its electoral success to the wealth of campaign funds that allowed it to come from nowhere and press itself into the public consciousness with slick advertising. Among those who offered congratulations to the DVU on its electoral victory was the French Front national leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen. In June 1998 Frey and Le Pen signed an agreement in Strasbourg to support each other in the 1999 European parliamentary elections, and to fight the introduction of the European single currency (see France).
In the September 1998 general election the DVU failed to secure any parliamentary representation although it emerged as the strongest of the three far-right parties that stood candidates (for details, see General background).
Die Republikaner (REP, the Republicans) is a populist party founded in Bavaria in 1983. Its programme demands a stronger Germany, the reclamation of Germany's former borders, a more aggressive foreign policy and limits on the rights of immigrants and asylum-seekers. Party activists tend to express antisemitic sentiments mainly in the form of innuendo.
Since the change of leadership of the REP in December 1994, when former SS officer Franz Schönhuber, the party's founder and long-standing chairman, was replaced by the thirty-nine-year-old lawyer Rolf Schlierer, the REP has steered a more moderate course, distancing itself from the violent far right. This has led to internal quarrels and repeated public criticism of Schlierer by the still-popular Schönhuber (see also Holocaust denial).
The REP has had some success at the state level, where they present themselves as a 'respectable' right-wing party, distancing themselves from skinheads, neo-Nazis and extremists such as Frey. But their xenophobia puts them firmly on the far right.
In early September 1998, during the general election campaign, the REP won a legal battle to screen controversial television advertisements when a court in Mainz put pressure on private television channels that were determined not to give any air-time to the far right's election campaign. The court held that the advertisements should be shown in the interest of free speech.
The 4,000-strong Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD, National Democratic Party of Germany) is the oldest far-right party in Germany. Founded in 1964 to unite the fragmented right, it claims adherence to the constitution although, like the REP, it is classified as a far-right organization by the BfV, and is therefore subject to federal monitoring.
The NPD is far more extremist and open to neo-Nazis. It has had no electoral success. Its focus is at the local level, where it co-ordinates grassroots far-right activism and runs campaigns against, for example, the construction of mosques and 'foreign drug dealers'. The group sees itself as the last upholder of national socialism in the midst of a European far right that has become mainstream.
Of major importance is the NPD's youth organization, Die Jungen National-demokraten (JND, Young National Democrats), the only far-right organization which operates nationwide. At a time when the membership of far-right organizations is diminishing, the JND actively appeals to neo-Nazis whose organizations have been outlawed in the last few years (see also below).
At the turn of the year, the NPD's leader, Udo Voigt, announced his intention of concentrating the party's activities in eastern Germany in the run-up to the September 1998 parliamentary elections. He said he would actively seek the support of the over 4 million unemployed. The NPD was poised to wage an active campaign in eastern regions such as Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, which had 22 per cent unemployment; polls suggested ultra-nationalist parties would obtain 8 per cent of the vote there (for election results, see General background).
Extra-parliamentary far-right organizations
Illegal extra-parliamentary far-right organizations include: the Deutsche Alternative (DA, German Alternative) and the Nationalistische Front (Nationalist Front), banned in 1992; the Freiheitliche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (FAP, German Workers' Freedom Party) and the Hamburg-based Nationale Liste (NL, National List), banned in 1995. In March 1998 a court in Frankfurt upheld the ban on the Nationalist Front. These groups have found it increasingly difficult to function in any way, although they attempt to keep one-time members interested with irregular newsletters and occasional meetings. In August 1997 the state of Brandenburg banned the Kameradschaft Oberhavel as a far-right organization, and in September the state of Bremen banned the Bremer Volkskulturverein as an extremist organization. In addition, several hundred organizations are under observation by the federal and state offices of the BfV.
Many members of banned organizations have become involved in legal and ostensibly more moderate organizations. Among methods of combatting the bans is the replacement of illegal organizations by new neo-Nazi groups founded at local level with new names and new publications.
An unknown number of right-wingers, skinheads and neo-Nazis are organized in smaller units such as 'associations' or even paramilitary squads. Some are close to the NPD.
In the state of Brandenburg the only significantly active and public neo-Nazi group at present is the Berlin-based Die Nationalen. Founded in 1992, the organization serves principally as an umbrella organization for activists from the banned Nationalist Front and the FAP and is behind the publication of a regional network of neo-Nazi newspapers. Their paper in Berlin, Berlin-Brandenburger Zeitung, claims a circulation of 22,000. It appears every six weeks and contains racist and antisemitic material. Die Nationalen have launched a campaign under the slogan 'Jobs for German youth!' and have held several marches and rallies on this theme. Although the group is generally careful to avoid links with organized violence, in order to avoid a state ban, there has been a marked rise in racist violence in precisely those towns - Cottbus, Ückermark and Fürstenwalde - where it has strong support.
In mid-November 1997 Die Nationalen formally disbanded. Its chairman, Frank Schwerdt, said they had 'accomplished what was to be accomplished'. Up to its dissolution, the group claimed to have 300 members, although the BfV put the figure at 150. The main thrust of its policy was to develop Kameradschaften, local tightly knit neo-Nazi groups with a high degree of mobility and autonomy throughout former East Germany and Berlin. The dissolution appeared to be an attempt to pre-empt a ban.
In March 1997 Berlin's top security official, Jörg Schönbohm, noted that the city's neo-Nazis were co-ordinating their activities with increasing efficiency and were moving further underground to avoid detection by the police, giving up the larger banned organizations in favour of small group meetings in members' homes. He said that the former East Berlin had become the centre of the country's neo-Nazi movement.
On 8 December 1997, in a raid on seventeen apartments, police in Berlin confiscated neo-Nazi propaganda and weapons.
It was reported in July 1998 that neo-Nazis had 'taken control' of several sites in the town of Eberswalde in the state of Brandenburg: armed neo-Nazis were patrolling the town's railway station, had 'all but seized control' of a local petrol station and were pressurizing people to make the Nazi salute when they filled their cars with petrol. Many youths in the town displayed Nazi symbols which are banned in Germany.
In mid-July 1998 police arrested six neo-Nazis in the eastern state of Saxony and were hunting a seventh following a brutal attack on five Portuguese workers following Germany's defeat in the World Cup football championship. In a separate incident, police in the western state of Rhineland-Palatinate raided apartments of suspected neo-Nazis, detaining eight men and seizing large numbers of illegal weapons, outlawed Nazi symbols and a bust of Hitler.
On 5 September 1998 five people were injured in a clash between members of the NPD and left-wing extremists at an election rally in Göppingen. The following day, twenty police officers were injured in a confrontation with far-right youths shouting 'Sieg Heil!' and 'Heil Hitler!' after the cancellation of a rock concert in Hirschfelde. Also on 5 September police detained three teenagers who had attacked a woman from Bangladesh. Earlier in the week, two neo-Nazi skinheads in the eastern town of Halle caused severe physical injury to a man from Mozambique.
It was reported in September 1998 that, alarmed by the resurgence in right-wing extremism, the state of Brandenburg had mobilized a forty-five-member commando squad to respond to emergency calls about neo-Nazi attacks. The rapid reaction force, equipped with helicopters, special weapons and high-speed vehicles, arrested twenty-three people in its first week of operations. Criminal investigators said they had pinpointed nine hotbeds of extremist activity in Brandenburg - Eberswalde, Oranienburg, Neuruppin, Rathenow, Nauen, Mahlow, Luckenwalde, Forst and Hennigsdorf.
Neo-Nazi rock music
Neo-Nazi rock music and its message of hate is reportedly thriving in Germany (see also Czech Republic). Concerts are staged clandestinely, masquerading as private functions; the Internet lists the venues, and the CDs, tapes and videos are smuggled in from abroad. The underground music and concert scene is said by researchers and insiders to be the 'glue' which binds neo-Nazis together across Germany, particularly in the East. Authorities say there are some sixty skinhead bands in Germany and there were seventy-nine far-right concerts in 1997 with audiences of up to 1,600 - twice the number of audiences in 1995. There are more than 150 recordings known to be 'indexed', or banned.
Political activists use the concerts as a recruiting ground. The fanzines and record companies, such as Rock Nord and the Nordland Network of Düsseldorf, sell goods at these events (for Norland, see especially Sweden). Youth clubs and pubs are said regularly to provide rehearsal and performance facilities for neo-Nazi skinhead bands, often at the expense of the local authority. Magdeburg's far-right Toitsche Patrioten (German Patriots) can regularly be heard in the area. While most of the music is said to be deafeningly loud and repetitive, there are also balladeers like Frank Rennicke, who composes soft melodic songs to such Nazi martyrs as Rudolf Hess or racist laments for German girls said to be at the mercy of foreigners. The veteran skinhead band Böhsen Onkelz (Angry Uncles), a Frankfurt punk band notorious in the 1980s for its racist music, has gone respectable and mainstream, distancing itself from racism.
In mid-May 1997, in raids in Ulm, Biberach and Esslingen, police confiscated 45,000 CDs of racist songs by suspected neo-Nazi rock bands calling for violence against foreigners. A twenty-nine-year-old man from Ulm was detained on suspicion of selling the CDs in Germany and abroad.
In July 1997 it was reported that a CD containing a song entitled 'Put a knife in a Jew's body' was in circulation among skinhead communities in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. On 7 August 1997 police seized hundreds of CDs in nationwide raids as part of an operation to crack down on neo-Nazi recordings by skinhead bands.
On 21 October 1997 in the northern city of Kiel police seized over 30,000 CDs with far-right content. Fourteen people were arrested, including the owner of a Kiel record shop, who faced charges of incitement to racial hatred and use of banned symbols.
Far-right demonstrations
In February 1997 a planned far-right meeting in the Berlin district of Hellersdorf, organized in protest against the large rise in German unemployment, erupted into violence involving neo-Nazis, left-wing demonstrators and the police. The meeting was organized by the JND (see above). After repeated protests, the authorities decided the meeting should be held indoors.
'Ritual' clashes took place on May Day 1997. In Leipzig police halted a rally against unemployment which the NPD had hoped would be the biggest demonstration by the far right since the war. Court action to render the protest illegal, followed by a huge deployment of police, prevented anything like the hoped-for numbers of demonstrators gathering. In Berlin, on the same day, about 7,000 far-right activists attended two separate 'revolutionary demonstrations'. The expected level of violence did not materialize. In Münden, near Hanover, about 300 right-wingers clashed with a smaller group of left-wing demonstrators. A policeman was seriously injured and about 150 right-wing demonstrators were arrested.
In August 1997 police arrested over 400 people as right-wing extremists attempted to mark the tenth anniversary of Rudolf Hess's death (17 August). Over sixty of those arrested were left-wingers who clashed with the far-right activists and the police. Most of the arrests took place as police throughout the country checked cars and buses carrying suspected extremists to Hess rallies, banned in most of Germany. The anniversary of Hess's death has become a ritual game of 'hide-and-seek' between neo-Nazis, who contend Hess was murdered in a British prison, and the police. Among others, German extremists exploited more liberal freedom of speech laws in neighbouring Denmark to rally in the town of Köge.
The following year (17 August 1998) border guards stopped about 120 suspected neo-Nazis from travelling to Denmark to participate in the events marking the eleventh anniversary of Hess's death (see Denmark). Police said they had also detained about thirty-five people for attempting to stage similar gatherings in Germany.
On 24 January 1998 some 1,200 far-right activists protested in Dresden against the opening of the Wehrmacht exhibition (see Countering antisemitism). The high court gave permission for the NPD to hold a rally. In response, over 1,000 left-wingers staged a counter-demonstration. Few people were hurt in the scuffling which ensued.
On May Day 1998 police used water cannons and riot batons to disperse thousands of left-wing protesters who were attempting to disrupt a NDP rally in Leipzig. The leader of Germany's Jewish community, Ignatz Bubis, criticized the Leipzig court for allowing the demonstration to go ahead. Other critics of the court included the mayor of Leipzig and the national president of Germany's police union. Officials in Leipzig banned the march three times. The Leipzig court said the city administration could not ban the march as the NPD was a legally registered political party.
On Saturday 19 September 1998, immediately prior to the general
election, about 5,000 people, arrayed in mock military formation, took part in the biggest
neo-Nazi demonstration Germany has seen in recent years. They were escorted by 6,000
police on their march through a housing estate in Rostock, the largest city in the eastern
state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the poorest of the sixteen federal states and the one
with the highest rate of unemployment. About 130 neo-Nazis and left-wingers were taken
into custody, mainly for possessing weapons or wearing banned Nazi emblems. The march was
intended both as an election rally for the JND and to commemorate neo-Nazi riots in the
area six years earlier, when skinheads torched the homes of Vietnamese immigrants and
fought running battles with police. Marchers were addressed by Torsten Kowalski, a
neo-Nazi skinhead who stood for election the following week (skinheads account for two out
of three NPD members).
In the BfV's annual report on the far right (released in May 1998, see Parties, organizations, movements), antisemitic crimes were not listed separately from other racist crimes. However, a breakdown (provided on request) showed that, after several years of a decline in antisemitic incidents, there was an increase in 1997 of 965 compared to the 817 incidents reported in 1996. The vast majority of these involved the publication or distribution of antisemitic literature. The number of cemetery desecrations remained constant at 40; the number of physical assaults declined from 29 to 11.
Although a large proportion of racist crimes take place in the former East Germany, the problem is widespread in western Germany as well. In Frankfurt, for example, city officials said the number of prosecutions involving far-right defendants in 1997 was ten times higher than 1996.
In 1997 there were several incidents of neo-Nazi violence in Lübeck: in May St Vicelin's Church was gutted in an arson attack; on 25 June swastikas were sprayed on the door of St Jacobi Church; several days later, in separate incidents, there was an arson attack, including the daubing of swastika, on St Augustine's Church; on 16 September a swastika was sprayed on a kindergarten playground outside St Jürgen's Church and swastikas and antisemitic slogans were painted on a high school.
On 7 July 1997 Peter Hirschfeld, the leader of the Jewish community of Hildesheim, near Hanover, told the media that he had personally received more than a dozen telephone calls in which he had been called a 'Jewish pig' and told that he should be gassed; other members of the community had received similar threats and abuse. He said that he had been greeted on the street by Hitler salutes and shouts of 'Heil Hitler!' and told by passers-by that he should go to Israel. His car had been vandalized as well. Other Jews in the town had complained of rising antisemitism and been told by the police that their complaints were being taken 'very seriously' and that daubings on the Jewish chapel in Hildesheim cemetery as well as the systematic tearing down of posters advertising Jewish cultural meetings were being investigated.
In August 1997 it was reported that visitors were leaving an increasing number of neo-Nazi slogans in the guest book of the memorial centre at the site of the former Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald. The director of the centre said neo-Nazi messages had increased 'dramatically' in the last few years. In July 1998 the memorial monument at the Buchenwald concentration camp site was defaced. The eleven-figure sculpture, erected in 1958, was damaged by unknown assailants. Police arrested three teenagers in connection with the desecration. The authorities said that the suspects were part of a group of youths in the eastern German town of Weimar linked to extremist organizations. Two of them had previously been charged with acts of physical violence and property damage. The youths, who claimed they had no political motive for the attack, told police they had been drinking heavily beforehand.
At the end of August 1997 unknown assailants desecrated forty-four gravestones in a Jewish cemetery in Floss in Bavaria. At the end of October 1997, unknown assailants desecrated three graves in a Jewish cemetery in Berlin-Weissensee. In mid-September 1997 unknown assailants desecrated twenty-eight graves in Berlin's largest Jewish cemetery. Police said there was no evidence to suggest an antisemitic motive.
In September 1997, following protests from local people, the council of Gollwitz, a 400-strong village near Berlin, voted not to house sixty Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union in a disused mansion. 'We've got nothing against Jews but since we heard they were due to come here, everyone is frightened,' one villager was quoted as saying. Another reportedly said: 'Everyone knows what foreigners get up to. You can see it on the television every day - these criminals, these burglars from the East. These Jews, they just make money all the time. They should go to Israel, where they come from.'
In November 1997 a Berlin court ruled that the Berlin Deutsche Oper had had no choice but to dismiss Gerd Reinke, a member of the company during its tour of Israel, given the damage he had caused to the opera's reputation. On 1 June 1997 Reinke was sent home in disgrace after signing 'Adolf Hitler' on the bill in a Tel Aviv hotel bar. He was subsequently dismissed. At the opera's first performance in that city, after the incident became known, representatives of the orchestra formally apologized for the incident. Reinke has no history of making antisemitic remarks.
In December 1997 the defence ministry said it was investigating an incident at the army's elite leadership academy in Hamburg in which Manfred Röder, a convicted neo-Nazi, lectured to young officers in May 1995. Röder, sixty-eight, was released from prison in 1990 after serving eight years of a thirteen-year sentence for arson attacks in 1980 in which two Vietnamese immigrants died. He was also convicted in 1978 of distributing neo-Nazi literature. The disclosure of the 1995 lecture followed a number of embarrassing cases of extremist activity among junior officers and conscripts. Home-made videos showed troops engaging in mock executions, mock rapes and simulated torture, and chanting Nazi and antisemitic slogans. Several days earlier disciplinary proceedings had been announced against six paratroopers who had unfurled pre-war military banners and displayed pictures of Hitler at a barracks drinking session. The magazine Der Spiegel said that the background to the series of extremist incidents was an army culture in which the Nazi-era Wehrmacht, long a taboo subject in Germany, was being rehabilitated. The defence minister, Volker Rühe, told a closed parliamentary defence committee that legal and disciplinary action would be taken against those shown in the videos, and announced plans for the improved screening of recruits.
It was reported in January 1998 that vandals had desecrated the Jewish cemetery in Boizenburg near Hamburg, the second incident of vandalism in the cemetery in four months.
In February 1998 employees at the former concentration camp of Sachsenhausen discovered extremist slogans scrawled in the guest book of the memorial site. The following month it was reported that police had arrested four teenagers said to come from the Berlin area for giving the Nazi salute at Sachsenhausen.
In June 1998 it was reported that the German airline Lufthansa had apologized to an Israeli passenger, Yitzhak Barak, who had reported that a ground crew supervisor in Germany had called him a 'dirty Jew'. The supervisor had told him that if he was dissatisfied he could go to the Israeli airline El Al, which 'deals with your people'.
In mid-June 1998 German police arrested twenty-eight suspected neo-Nazis for making Nazi salutes and uttering Nazi slogans, including three who gave the Nazi salute at the site of the former Ravensbrück concentration camp.
In August 1998 Moses Abraham Stern, an Orthodox Jew from the West Bank
settlement of Kiryat Arba, was spat on and beaten as he walked down one of Berlin's main
streets. Michel Wrasmann, mayor of the Berlin district of Wilmersdorf, sharply condemned
the attack.
In an article entitled 'Anti-Jewish children's Bible in Germany', which
appeared in the magazine Explorations (vol. 12, no. 1, 1998), Dr Peter Fiedler, a
professor at the Freiburg Paedogogische Hochschule, criticized the Freiburg-based
publisher Herder Verlag for having 'adopted' The Children's Bible in 365 Stories,
published by Lion Publishing, which, he said, had become a bestseller (over 100,000 copies
sold in five years) and had received the 'imprimatur' of the archdiocese of Munich. Dr
Fiedler claimed that passages in the book 'show a distinct anti-Jewish atmosphere in order
to separate Jesus' person and teaching from its real "Sitz im Leben" within
contemporary Jewry in Israel. Such an opposition between Jesus and the religious leaders
of his people obviously contradicts not only the historical facts but also the fundamental
change the churches have undergone concerning Judaism.' He found it particularly offensive
that Herder Verlag, a Catholic publishing house which claims to promote Jewish-Christian
dialogue, should have published the book.
See also Parties, organizations, movements, Publications and media and Countering antisemitism.
In February 1997 Thies Christopherson, who had recently been arrested but released owing to poor health, died in Kiel at the age of seventy-nine. Christopherson, a former SS officer and a guard at Auschwitz, had published books and magazines, particularly Die Auschwitz Lüge (The Auschwitz Lie), which denied that the Holocaust had taken place. Officials in the city of Flensburg banned a memorial ceremony to honour Christopherson. Police said they had expected that up to 300 neo-Nazis would attend the ceremony.
At the launch in December 1997 of REP founder Franz Schönhuber's book,
'Le Pen, the Rebel: The National Front, a Model for Germany' in Munich, the French Front
national leader Jean-Marie Le Pen repeated his 1987 remark that the crematoria in the Nazi
death camps were 'a detail of history' (see France). The public prosecutor in Munich
requested that Le Pen's European parliamentary immunity be lifted so that he could be
tried for Holocaust denial in the German courts. In October 1998 the European parliament
voted overwhelmingly to lift Le Pen's immunity.
See also Parties, organizations, movements and Legal matters.
Antisemitic themes are prominent in the papers published by the DVU (see Parties, organizations, movements), which include the Deutsche Nationalzeitung and Deutsche Wochen Zeitung (weeklies with estimated circulations of 80,000-130,000 and 32,000-60,000 respectively). The papers publish Holocaust-denial propaganda and show unceasing hostility to the German Jewish population.
On 20 February 1997, writing in the mainstream daily newspaper Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung about a speech British Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind had
delivered in Bonn, the journalist Michaela Wiegel described the British minister as 'the
Jew Rifkind' (i.e. a German turn of phrase often used pejoratively during the Third
Reich). The newspaper apologized several days later, saying that there was 'no antisemitic
intent'. Rifkind said he considered the matter closed.
In late October 1997 a survey of the political opinions of all German
student officers training to join the national army concluded that most of them held
right-wing views. Among the results of the survey, leaked by a German newspaper, were that
over 20 per cent said they were nationalist-conservatives. Over 20 per cent of the student
officers said that democracy was not important and admitted they considered violence a
means of ending political disputes. A similar survey in 1992 said that the army was
'becoming increasingly popular with young men who have little or no interest in democratic
principles.'
In January 1997 it was reported that Jürgen Rieger, a lawyer, had been fined some DM15,000 (US$9,500) for driving a war-time Nazi jeep emblazoned with SS runes through the Hamburg district of Reinsbeck.
In the same month it was reported that two far-right skinheads who had savagely attacked three black British building workers in a racist attack in Mahlow near Berlin in June 1996 had been given heavy sentences by a court in Potsdam. One of the skinheads was said to have daubed anti-Jewish graffiti on the walls of his cell. In another case, heard by the same judge in Potsdam, a skinhead was jailed for seven-and-a-half years for the racist manslaughter of a punk rocker in February 1996.
In February 1997 Hans-Christian Wendt, twenty-five, the editor of the neo-Nazi newspaper Berlin-Brandenburger Zeitung and a member of the far-right organization Die Nationalen (see Parties, organizations, movements), was convicted of disseminating unconstitutional propaganda and of incitement to racial hatred. He was sentenced to one year's imprisonment.
In April 1997, in a case which could affect the posting of neo-Nazi propaganda on the Internet, the Munich prosecutor's office decided to try the head of the German division of the Internet provider Compuserve on pornography charges. The prosecutor's office said Felix Somm 'knowingly allowed images of child pornography . . . from the so-called Internet to be made accessible to customers of Compuserve Germany', and furthermore that Compuserve subscribers also had access to computer games that contained forbidden images of Hitler and Nazi symbols such as the swastika. The company contested the charges, saying it was doing all it could to prevent access to offensive material on the Internet. In July 1997 parliament passed a law to prohibit access to banned material, including child pornography and Nazi propaganda, on the Internet. The implications of the law, which took effect on 1 August 1997, regarding the possible liability of on-line service providers are not yet clear.
Two Germans were charged with the attempted murder of a French police
officer in Lens in northern France in connection with disturbances during the World Cup
football championships in June 1998. More than 600 German hooligans from thirty German
towns took part in the rioting, much of which was caused by far-right skinheads.
On 27 January 1997, in a speech to mark the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp, Germany's foreign minister, Klaus Kinkel, called for a crackdown on the use of the Internet by neo-Nazis. 'The Internet should not, and will not, be used as an electronic rendezvous point for right-wing extremists', he said.
On 2 March 1997 President Roman Herzog called on Germans to be more tolerant of each other. 'People must recognize that negative images of others are dangerous fictions which must be put aside through patient education', he told an annual week-long programme to improve relations between German Christians and Jews.
On 1 May 1997 more than 100,000 people demonstrated across the country at May Day rallies, protesting against record unemployment and an accompanying rise in right-wing extremism. Speaking at the largest rally, of about 20,000 in Leipzig, Klaus Zwickel, chairman of the IG Metall metalworkers and engineering union, said: 'Sixty years ago it was the Jews who were blamed for everything. Now it is apparently the turn of the Turks, the Africans or the asylum-seekers. We must stop other groups being made scapegoats for a second time in German history.'
In March 1998, in response to a wave of criticism from the Jewish community and from the Bavarian state government, the German publishers Eulenspiegel Verlag withdrew a CD-ROM version of Hitler's Mein Kampf (the Bavarian state holds the copyright on the book). Although the CD, featuring the voice of Ekkehard Schall, the son-in-law of Bertolt Brecht, the late communist playwright, was meant to be satirical, critics said it could have been used by neo-Nazis.
Speaking on the fifty-fourth anniversary of the 20 July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, Berlin deputy mayor Christine Bergmann said the spread of extreme nationalist and anti-foreigner views among German youth was good reason to keep alive the spirit of anti-Nazi resistance. She urged that memories of the anti-Nazi resistance be preserved, especially for youth who had no personal experience of the National Socialist era.
Institute for Jewish Policy Research and American Jewish Committee
© JPR 1999