Crackdown on neo-Nazis ahead of ‘celebration’ of 1992 hostel attack

ARMED police have stormed the homes and offices of numerous neo-Nazi groups in the biggest raids of their kind ever conducted in western Germany.

Around 900 officers yesterday raided 150 premises across the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s largest, ahead of feared celebrations on Sunday marking a notorious firebombing of an asylum-seeker’s refuge 20 years ago.

Weapons including rifles, clubs and knives were seized along with banned neo-Nazi literature and at a bronze relief sculpture of wartime Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. Public prosecutors will now consider bringing charges against dozens of people.

The raids came as Germany reflects on the events of August 1992 when hundreds of neo-Nazis torched the home housing Roma and Vietnamese people near Rostock, cheered on by thousands of bystanders. Luckily no-one died in the blaze which has become a source of twisted pride for the far-right.

The police swoop was followed by the state’s interior minister Ralf Jaeger banning three ultra-right Hitler-worshipping groups – the National Resistance Dortmund, Comrades’ Association of Hamm and Comrades’ Association Aachener Land.

“The three groups were considered the most dangerous in the state,” said Mr Jaeger. The Aachen group was so violent that media reports said its actions “bordered on terrorism.” Two members were stopped en route to Berlin in 2010 with bombs containing glass shards which they planned to throw at police and left-wingers.

All three groups were linked to the NSU – National Socialist Underground – responsible for carrying out ten murders of immigrants and a policewoman over a 13-year period.

“With this we are tearing a big hole in the network of neo-Nazis,” said Mr Jaeger.

The radical Right continues to be a thorn in the side of Germany although most activity is in the former Communist east rather than the more prosperous west.

Two decades on from those disgraceful scenes at Rostock commentators are taking stock of the neo-Nazi menace and can draw little comfort from what they see.

“In Eastern Germany, the neo-Nazis are winning,’ remarked news magazine Der Spiegel recently. Reunited Germany has failed both to grasp the menace of the far-right and devise an effective strategy to combat it.

Even the crimes of the NSU have been met with indifference while the fertile breeding grounds of former Communist East Germany continue to churn out extremists gaining power in regional parliaments and local councils. Individuals and authorities have tried to fight back. Nursery school teachers are vetted in the state of Mecklenburg Vorpommern to stop the far-Right trying to indoctrinate children. Hoteliers in the state of Brandenburg were last month issued with a new guidebook telling them how to recognise and stop Nazis from staying in their establishments. At the weekend there was even a golf tournament aimed at the young to stop them joining neo-Nazi groups.

The centre-left Sueddeutsche newspaper believes an apathy has descended on Germans that neutralises any sense of outrage. It said this week: “The ten neo-Nazi murders were uncovered nine months ago. Politicians and security authorities have returned to normal astonishingly quickly. The outrage over the NSU crimes has died down.

“Sometimes one remembers all the uproar that engulfed the whole of society after the Baader-Meinhof murders and one is surprised about the general calm today. The everyday violent racism in Germany hasn’t turned into a big issue. Meanwhile, those citizens who confront the neo-Nazis still don’t get much help. It cannot and must not go on like this, the way it started 20 years ago.”

Germany has failed several times to ban the far-right NPD party and it is unclear just what the solution might be, as long as Germany remains, in essence, two societies – the richer west and the far poorer east.