The German village where Adolf Hitler is still the Fuehrer

Published on Sunday 6 February 2011 17:03

JAMEL is a village taken over by neo-Nazis. Wooden signposts by the main road point to Vienna, Paris, and Braunau am Inn - the birthplace of Adolf Hitler. A far-right leader runs his demolition company from home, its logo featuring a man smashing a Star of David with a sledgehammer.

• Even the signposts in the village of Jamel reflect the Nazi sympathies: Braunau am Inn was Hitler's birthplace. Picture: AP

Every few months, locals host outdoor parties where guests sing "Hitler is my Fuehrer" to chants of "Heil" around a massive bonfire.

Jamel is the most extreme manifestation of a chilling phenomenon in the former communist East Germany: a creeping encroachment of neo-Nazism that makes Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania one of only two states where Germany's biggest far-right party, the National Democratic Party, or NPD, sits in parliament.

The extreme-right is believed to be behind some 40 attacks in the state over the past year, including stones thrown through windows of political parties and fireworks blown up in a prosecutor's mailbox. The state has Germany's highest unemployment rate outside Berlin, at 12.7 per cent in December.

"Federally the Islamic extremists are the biggest problem; for us the extreme right is the biggest problem," said Reinhard Mueller, who heads the state branch of Germany's domestic intelligence agency.

In Jamel, six of the 10 houses are in the hands of the far right, and authorities consider 10 of the village's 28 adults right-wing extremists. Local life is dominated by one man: Sven Krueger, a 36-year-old leading NPD official, who grew up here.

Officials say Krueger has been known to authorities for small-time criminal activity, but had stayed off the radar in recent years after turning to politics. That changed a week ago, however, when Krueger was arrested on charges of receiving stolen property and weapons violations after a five-month investigation. In a search of his home, authorities confiscated power tools they believe stolen and a submachine gun with 200 rounds of ammunition.

A few days before the arrest, a pit bull and a German Shepherd roamed the fenced yard of Krueger's home in the middle of town, and an NPD poster with the pledge "we keep our word" hung from a blue industrial bin out front, filled with waste from his demolition work. A woman smoking a cigarette in the yard said she didn't know where Krueger could be found.

At the end of the road, a man with closely cropped hair in a green tank top, arms covered with tattoos, ran out of another house and yelled "get out you dirty pest" at a photographer.Legally, very little can be done to expel the neo-Nazis - they carefully skirt German laws against displaying Nazi symbols, like the swastika or the SS runes, and the banned songs people hear in the night cannot be pinned on any one individual.

Still, residents say their sympathies are clear. Horst and Birgit Lohmeyer, who have lived in Jamel for the past seven years, say the local far-right scene attracts scores of neo-Nazis for parties a few times a year - including several hundred at Krueger's wedding last summer.

"They sit around the bonfire and sing these songs - 'Adolf Hitler is mein Fuehrer' they sing - they call out 'heil' - there are sometimes as many as 300 right extremists at these parties," Birgit Lohmeyer said.

In protest, the Lohmeyers organised a party of their own - an annual music festival on their nearly two-acre property that started in 2007.

"We hold this festival for democracy and tolerance to show that this town is not entirely in right-hands - that there are others here who don't believe in their ideology," Birgit Lohmeyer said.

The regional mayor of the 2,700-person district said he hopes the attention will help expose the agenda of the NPD to people who may otherwise have voted for them again in September. The party won 7.3 per cent of the vote when Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where Chancellor Angela Merkel has her constituency, last held state elections in 2006, giving them six of 71 seats.

"The NPD is nothing less than the successor to the Nazi party and their goals are the same," said Mayor Uwe Wandel at the Mercedes dealership he runs about 200 metres from Krueger's demolition company.

"Maybe today they're not talking about Jews but about foreigners in general, but their ideals are exactly the same."