Sharp Rise in Neo-Nazi Violence Worries Germany

by Ramesh Jaura

Four people have been murdered this year and more than 30 people have been killed by skinheads in the past 10 years, according to police officials and the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution.

The right-wing extremists are largely xenophobic neo-Nazis. They are fascinated by the racist views of Adolf Hitler, who wreaked havoc in Germany and Europe in the 1930s and 1940s and committed genocide against millions of Jews, and others.

The neo-Nazis are blamed for the four killings this year. In the eastern town of Dessau, a Mozambican who had lived in Germany for more than a decade died in June from injuries inflicted by three young right-wing extremists.

Last week in Ahlbeck on the Baltic Sea island of Usedom, a homeless man was found dead at the village church, having been beaten and kicked by four right-wing youths.

In two other eastern German towns, Wismar and Greifswald, homeless people have died following similar attacks.

"The series of extremist assaults mark a drastic increase in right-wing violence over past years," writes the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Those were the first right-wing killings the police had recorded since the mid-1990s. The previous nadir of right-wing violence occurred when the country was debating whether to tighten its asylum laws in the early 1990s.

The move was aimed at stemming illegal immigration of foreigners, mainly from the Third World, in a country which already harbors some seven million in a total population of 80 million.

Statistics from the German Federal Office of Criminal Investigation show right-wing violence, including killings, assaults, arson and bomb attacks, began to increase rapidly for the first time in 1991.

According to official sources, the German Interior Ministry alone spends $189.5 million a year on programs to stem xenophobic violence, which has proved to be more intractable than expected.

In an analysis of racial violence, the speaker of the German federal parliament, Wolfgang Thierse, said that German society as a whole was responsible for "a flawed development about which everyone complains."

Paul Spiegel, chair of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, says schools need to be more involved in the fight against neo-Nazi violence.

Spiegel would like to see education about national socialism and the teaching of democratic values packaged in more skillful and direct way.

German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer says that a "silent majority" might be abetting the crimes by not speaking out against them.

Commenting on a July 29 assault on seven people from the former Soviet republics, Fischer said: "The fact that hatred of foreigners lies behind the Duesseldorf attacks should rouse us all."

A prominent member of the Green Party, Fischer added: "We have reached a point where the majority of the population that has been silent up to now can no longer remain silent."

Fischer belongs to a generation of political leaders in Germany who organized student revolts across Europe in the late 1960s, challenging the values cherished by their parents.

"Now, the aggressively exaggerated swaggering of the skinheads shows up the complexes of a section of eastern German society that has yet to come to terms with itself and its past," says Stefan Dietrich, an analyst.

"Only when adults recognize their own deformities in these young people (committing acts of violence) will they be able to banish this ghost," Dietrich added.

The reference is to the fact that eastern Germany was, for nearly 40 years, ruled by the communist party SED, until ten years ago when Germany was reunified.

The state premier, Manfred Stolpe, who hails from the former East Germany and has witnessed right-wing extremist violence in his home state of Brandenburg, says he hopes that the debate over how to combat right-wing extremism was not just a way of filling column inches and air time in the generally quiet summer holiday period.

In a radio interview last week, the social democrat Stolpe said: "I hope that these acts, which bring shame on all of Germany, really will be tackled." He noted that the phenomenon had been underestimated in the last 10 years.

As government officials from the interior and justice ministries met yesterday to find ways to combat neo-Nazis, Bavarian Interior Minister Guenther Beckstein called for the government to adopt a zero-tolerance stance.

He said the government should apply to the German Constitutional Court for a ban on the right-wing National Democratic Party (NPD), which was becoming the political home of the neo-Nazi movement.

"The NPD is a natural rallying point for disorganized skinheads," said Beckstein, a member of the Christian Social Union, a sister party of the opposition Christian Democratic Party.

The federal interior ministry, headed by social democrat Otto Schilly, rejected Beckstein's proposal, arguing it would have no impact on neo-Nazi violence. In fact, he said, it would drive the NPD underground and make it more dangerous.

This view, however, is not shared by the German environment minister, Juergen Trittin, who belongs to the Green Party, the junior partner in the coalition government headed by the Social Democratic Party Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.

Trittin supported Beckstein in his demand for radical steps such as the banning of the right-wing extremists, said to be grouped in the tiny NPD party.