Neo-Nazis deny bomb plot was launch of a revolution

Published on Thursday 25 November 2004 01:17

A GERMAN far-right group accused of plotting a bomb attack on a Jewish centre in 2003 aimed to overthrow the government and install a Nazi-style dictatorship, prosecutors told a court yesterday.

With police special forces providing tight security, a federal prosecutor, Bernd Steudl, told the Munich court the group, led by a high-profile Nazi, Martin Wiese, planned to model their regime on Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.

"The organisation’s aim was to work toward a regime modelled on the National Socialist dictatorship from 1933 to 1945," Mr Steudl said.

Wiese, 28, and three others are accused of belonging to a terrorist organisation known as the Kameradschaft Sud (Southern Comrades) and of planning to bomb a Munich Jewish centre on 9 November 2003 during a foundation stone-laying ceremony that was to be attended by the then president, Johannes Rau.

The attack may have been timed to coincide with the 65th anniversary of Kristallnacht on 9 November 1938, one of Nazi Germany’s most notorious pogroms in which Jewish shops and synagogues were attacked in a harbinger of the Holocaust.

Testifying to the court yesterday, one of the accused, Alexander Maetzing, also 28, said that Wiese had spoken several times about bombing the Jewish centre, but there were no concrete plans for an attack.

"The actual intention and the planning did not exist. There was a lot of talk," said Maetzing, who allegedly told police previously that there were definite plans for the bombing and said the group had procured explosives. He denied there was a plan to overthrow the government.

"I don’t believe that it was the intention of our group to create a new Third Reich," Maetzing said.

Wiese’s lawyer, Anja Seul, said before the hearing that her client would not be making any statements. She did not believe there was a plan for a bomb attack, or that Wiese belonged to a terrorist group.

Germany’s domestic intelligence service has estimated that in 2002 the country had 10,700 far-right extremists ready to use violence, a rise of 30 per cent since 1998.

The trial continues.