Neo-Nazis mar Dresden's day

It was estimated to be the biggest far-right demonstrations since the end of the Second World War, and came just a week before a vital regional election is held in west Germany.

The entire leadership of extreme-right parties in the country staged a mini Nuremberg Rally to bolster supporters ahead of the poll in Schleswig Holstein next Sunday.

If successful there, it will be a nightmare for the government: proof that the politics of the gutter can be transplanted from the depressed and bankrupt east to the wealthy west. Polls indicate that the biggest neo-Nazi party, the NPD, will gain seats in the state assembly.

Dresden, therefore, was a macabre political theatre for the far-right. What was to have been a day of solemn remembrance for the dead morphed into a showcase for the extreme.

Shaven-headed demonstrators came from all over Germany, carrying black flags, balloons and banners bearing slogans such as: "The bombing Holocaust from England cannot be denied."

Police estimates put the Nazi marchers at 5,000, while party organisers said between 6,000 and 7,000 attended, dwarfing the 4,700 who turned out in Hamburg in 1997 to protest about an exhibition implicating German soldiers in wartime atrocities.

Their first stop was a cemetery where representatives from the UK, Russia, Germany and the Jewish community in Germany and the United States laid wreaths to the civilian dead whose ashes are buried in mass graves.

A Dresden citizens’ group was supposed to go next, but the far-right muscled in, laying wreaths claiming 350,000 "innocents" were killed in the attacks - codenamed Operation Thunderclap - and fighting with leftist counter-demonstrators on the fringes of the cemetery.

One banner at the site read: "The bombing Holocaust will not be suppressed!" Another: "Allied bomb terror - then as now. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden and today Baghdad. No forgiveness, no forgetting."

The neo-Nazis deliberately use the word associated with the destruction of six million Jews under Hitler to provoke their enemies.

Outside the Semper Opera House in the centre of Dresden, the phalanxes of the far-right drew up to welcome the hierarchy of diverse extreme parties. There was Franz Schoenhueber, a former SS man who heads up the Republikaner Party.

Next to him stood Gerhard Frei of the German People’s Union, Udo Voigt of the NPD, which scored spectacularly in gaining parliamentary seats in Saxony - the state incorporating Dresden - last September, and Holger Apfel, the local MP, who touched raw nerves by equating Dresden’s fate with that of the true Holocaust victims.

Dresden, untouched by bombing just months before the end of the Second World War, was 85 per cent destroyed by two waves of British bombers on the night of 13 February 1945. United States planes blasted the city the next day.

The official death toll is put at about 35,000, but many survivors believe the actual number was higher as bodies - civilians mostly, fleeing from the advancing Red Army in the east - were reduced to ashes in the firestorm.

"Thousands of innocent people, including children and refugees, died in most terrible circumstances," Chancellor Gerhard Schrder said in a statement, issued before the commemoration ceremonies began.

Britain’s ambassador to Germany, Sir Peter Torry, said likening the bombing of Dresden to the Holocaust was "highly problematic" but played down the threat posed by the NPD.

"I would take the phenomenon seriously but not overrate it. The neo-Nazis got into Saxony’s parliament but on a low turnout," he said.

No RAF crewmen took part in yesterday’s services and acts of remembrance. The healing was left to the clergy instead. The Very Rev John Irvine, Dean of Coventry Cathedral, destroyed by German bombers in the war, and the Rev Dr Oliver Schuegraf from Wurzburg, Germany, presented a cross of nails as a sign of reconciliation to the Bishop of Saxony.