• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 681 0

with the Republicans and their former SS leader Schonhuber winning votes by staying above the fray, the neo-Nazi parties changing names as fast as they were banned, disseminating trie propaganda, while the brutal young skinheads did the dirty work. The same pattern had emerged in other Western countries, including the United States, where orchestrated racist violence was also on the rise. But while the FBI and other law enforcement agencies were concerned about the degree of organization, even international organization, of racist attacks, German law enforcement continued to insist that these attacks were only random. In the; face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary and a mounting international embarrassment, in 1994 they grudgingly conceded that there was some organization to skinhead violence. In Germany approximately five racist attacks occurred every day, usually against immigrants, with at least one person killed almost every month.

In 1992 there were an estimated 2,200 right-wing attacks, in which 17 people were killed. Yet in February 1993, Federal Prosecutor Alexander von Stahl said that neo-Nazis were under control and the real danger was left-wing terrorists. There had been only one death caused by a leftist that year. But von Stahl went on to explain that the leftists were organized while the neo-Nazis were just drunken kids.

The skinheads learned when arrested to always say they were drunk, and they consistently got lighter sentences than the leftists. Until 1994 law enforcement had tended to stand by passively and “let the young people blow off some steam.”

The politicians were scrambling to master the winning Nazi issue, immigration. It was true that Germany had an extremely liberal immigration law and that the 450,000 asylum-seekers taken in by Germany in 1992 were twice as many as those taken by the rest of Western Europe combined. But it was also true that at the time of unification the foreign population of East Germany represented only 1.2 percent of the total. Yet “the foreigner problem” was given great credence there. When Hitler had first gained popular support by decrying “the Jewish problem,” Jews had been only one percent of the German population. In reunited Germany, the growing antiforeign sentiment did not correspond to the presence of foreigners. Violence against foreigners increased even in East German cities, which foreigners had left after the fall of the GDR. While Magdeburg experienced a dramatic increase in anti-foreigner violence, the number of foreigners there declined from 9,200 in May 1990 to 1,400 in January 1991.

The extreme right was able to get the government to treat the antiforeigner issue as though it had some validity. Once the right started winning voters, the establishment started talking as though there really were a foreigner problem. The Republican party, by watching their rhetoric and not talking too often about Jews, was able to give the Nazi agenda the appearance of a legitimate grievance, winning seats in municipal elections and respectable showings in state contests.

Helmut Kohl had been trying to gain the anti-immigrant vote for years by toughening the immigration law, but the Social Democrats had blocked him from gaining the two-thirds in Parliament required for a constitutional amendment. At the end of 1992, seeing where their votes were going, the Social Democrats were ready to cave in, and the German asylum law, a showpiece of the West German constitution that was supposed to demonstrate a new Germany open to foreigners, was curtailed. Three days later, skinheads set a fire in Solingen, near Dusseldorf, and killed five Turkish women and children.

Neo-Nazis liked to talk about making Germany “great again.” This was a cause that was spirited by the unification, the anniversary of which has become a neo-Nazi holiday, like Hitler's birthday and the anniversary of Rudolf Hess's 1987 death. It was clear that after unification, many Germans wanted to see Germany's past treated more kindly. Helmut Kohl decided that the 1992 anniversary of reunification would