The Guardian 19 September, 2007
The Neo-Nazi menace
Victor Grossman*
An argument at a summer fair in a small east German town ended with a mob of 50 drunken young men wielding knives and other weapons and shouting "Foreigners get out!" chasing eight men from India — long-time residents of Muegeln, between Leipzig and Dresden — across the town square.
The Indians, some badly wounded, found refuge in a snack bar belonging to one of them. The police showed up just before the mob broke down the door.
A few days later, north of Berlin, a similar mob attacked the Pakistani owner of a little snack bar. He too was barely saved by the slow-acting police.
In June, in Thuringia, the mob victims were not people of colour, but a travelling theatre group with a show opposing race hatred. Several actors were injured, one of them severely.
Those are a few recent cases. Many incidents go unreported, but when they are serious enough to get into the media, the politicians respond quickly.
At a national level, whenever Germany’s international reputation might be damaged and investments or the tourist industry affected, there is loud outrage. It fades within a few days or weeks.
At a provincial level, there are loud expressions of surprised alarm that such things could happen here, on our turf.
At a local level, there is mostly denial and a variety of excuses.
The mayor of Muegeln quickly asserted that those in the mob were certainly out-of-towners. He knew of no organised right-wing extremists, he claimed, while, in an interview with a right-wing extremist magazine, he stressed that he was "proud to be a German" and that the whole incident was "overly dramatised".
Certain aspects of these events are repeated again and again. The police arrive late, usually after victims have been beaten, though, mostly, before anyone is killed.
They take down the names of one or two of the mob before letting them slip away with the others, but detain the victims for lengthy interrogation, sometimes for hours, often before providing for medical care.
Punishment of the mob members, if any, rarely exceeds a year or two on parole.
West German and foreign media invariably stress that far more attacks occur in eastern Germany, no doubt due to nasty traditions of the GDR before 1990.
This overlooks the fact that few mob members were old enough to attend even first or second grade in the GDR, so the former school system can hardly be blamed. And many such attacks also occur in western Germany.
Nonetheless, they are more frequent in the eastern provinces.
The main reason is clear. In east Germany, where almost the entire industrial base was scuttled during the first years after unification — or annexation, as many call it — the unemployment rate has steadily remained at about double the west German rate.
In many towns and smaller cities with one or two factories, their closure condemned the inhabitants to joblessness and hopelessness.
Older workers try to struggle through to an earlier and reduced pension. The [better educated] boys and most girls hunt for jobs in west Germany, Austria or Switzerland.
The boys with lower exam grades and often without the apprenticeship that is so necessary in Germany scrape by on meagre dole handouts, hang around bars and provide easy prey for the well-heeled neo-Nazi organisers who have swarmed into eastern Germany ever since the wall was pulled down.
Boys with lower exam grades scrape by on meagre dole handouts and provide easy prey for well-heeled neo-Nazi organisers.
There are three main racist groups, although their members often switch from one to another. Organised bands of neo-Nazi thugs who often collect Nazi flags, relics and weapons of all kinds and who were, until recently, conspicuous by virtue of their shaven heads, heavy boots and semi-uniform clothing, hunt down, beat and occasionally kill people of colour, usually small businessmen, but also tourists, the homeless, the handicapped and young people who don’t match their standards, like punks or people with dyed hair or anti-fascist slogans on their clothing.
A second, much larger group, does not belong to any organisation but supports them and their loud opposition to a worsening social system which they blame either on Jews or, due to the lack of many of these around, more commonly Turks, Vietnamese, Africans or Poles.
The third group includes the clever ones, who use the first two groups and the disappointment or apathy of the general public to gain political positions.
They may write the blood-curdling texts to rock music calling for cutting Jewish throats and new Auschwitz killings, which are growled out at drunken concerts and distributed on free CDs at schools around the country or at county fair get-togethers.
More and more, they dress more normally, they are more careful in what they say publicly, often addressing the social needs faced by so many people, even opposing the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, but never forgetting their stress on jobs "for Germans."
They are the ones whose political parties, the National Democratic Party (NPD) and its sister organisations, are achieving new victories in provincial elections, as in Saxony, where Muegeln is located. This brings them the large sums of money granted by the government to all parties winning electoral seats.
German politicians debate endlessly over whether to ban the NPD. An attempt to do so four years ago failed when the supreme court found that many of the nastiest statements and leaflets were written and distributed in part by spies sent into neo-Nazi groups by the German equivalent of the FBI, which had operatives in leading positions.
The Christian Democrats warned of another similar failure, but opposed the withdrawal of these dubious spies.
In many towns and villages, especially in eastern Germany, many local governments and judges either sympathise with or fear the neo-Nazi, who call these areas "liberated zones."
A few show more courage, together with church and union groups. But, when young anti-fascists actively defy the many NPD marches every weekend in city after city all over Germany, they often find themselves being apprehended and arrested, while the neo-Nazi get police protection.
The NPD is hoping to achieve the 5 per cent level in 2009 which would give it seats in the national Bundestag. Even if the economy improves, the neo-Nazi can increase in strength. If the economy gets worse, growth is almost inevitable.
What’s for certain is that many a worried German is looking at the history books to learn about the years preceding Hitler’s rise to power.
*Victor Grossman is a Harvard Law Graduate, and was a member of the Communist Party USA. While serving as a US soldier in post-WW2, and on the eve of an interrogation into his Communist affiliation Germany he defected to the east by swimming across the Danube River into the Soviet administered sector of Austria. He settled into life in the German Democratic Republic where he remains to this day.