A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [150]
But the Palestinians were not the only problem. Even if an attack such as the one on Goldenberg's showed every sign of Palestinian work, the assailants clearly had their European admirers. Mysteriously, mimeographed flyers appeared around Amsterdam saying in Dutch, “In the heart of Paris freedom fighters have done a brave act.” The statement attributed the attack to French “Nationalists… nauseated by the fact that there are Jews in the Red French govern-in ent. Fiterman, a real French name isn't it?” Charles Fiterman, a Jewish Communist, was the minister of transportation in the new leftist French government that had come to power in 1981.
Two of the bloodiest incidents of the period—the 1980 bombings of the Bologna train station, killing eighty-five, and the Munich Oktoberfest, killing 13—were both attributed to the extreme right. The Munich bombing was traced to a “martial sports group” led by Karl-Heinz Hoffmann. Shortly before the bombing, former Bavarian Prime Minister Franz-Josef Strauss had been quoted describing the group as people who were picked on for doing nothing more than spending their Sundays hiking. Many leaders of the German extreme right spent time in Hoffmann's sports camp. Hoffmann was released for lack of evidence in the Oktoberfest case, and after his sports group was banned, he became involved with the PLO and for a time centered his activities in Lebanon.
In France alone, between 1977 and 1981, 290 violent acts were attributed to the extreme right. A 1981 West German government report claimed there were 200,000 right-wing extremists in Germany, but that “only” 3,000 were armed and ready to commit violence. In March 1981 the Sinus Institute, a West German pollster commissioned by the chancellor's office, found that 13 percent of the West German electorate—some five and a half million West Germans—held extreme right-wing political views. These views included hatred of foreign minorities and hatred of democracy and a reverence for what in German is called Volk, Germans as a racial entity. Almost half of these extremists said they approved of the use of violence.
Throughout Western Europe, verbal and physical attacks on immigrants became increasingly common in the early 1980s. The Germans, as is the habit of their culture, invented a word for hostility to foreigners, Ausldnderfeindlichkeit. The neo-Nazi groups that had emerged in Germany in 1960 declined in the 1970s, but by 1980, they were larger and more active than ever before. As in France, the West German police seldom arrested right-wing extremists. On the other hand, in June 1983, when ten thousand people turned out to protest a planned rally of two hundred neo-Nazis in the Kreuzberg section of West Berlin, the police moved in with clubs and tear gas, and a pitched battle ensued in which 203 anti-Nazis were arrested. “Ausldnder ins KZ”—foreigners to the concentration camp—became a common graffiti slogan. “Foreigners out!” in various languages was becoming a common slogan throughout Western Europe. What was no longer common anywhere in Western Europe was an unguarded synagogue or Jewish institution. A Jew looking for a Sabbath service needed only look for the armed guards strolling in the street.
FOR THE FIRST YEAR anniversary of the Goldenberg attack, French television did a special documentary interviewing Jo Goldenberg and other people in the Pletzl. Andre Journo eagerly took his turn to explain his theory of how defeated President Valery Giscard d'Estaing had been behind the attack. Henri Finkelsztajn, whose schoolboy stutter occasionally flared, was not eager to make such media appearances, but he was still angry. After the attack the people of the Pletzl