The city of Trier has decided to ban auto license plates bearing letters alluding to the Nazi era. The mayor of the city, Felix Zimmerman, said that in recent months car owners have often demanded plates carrying letters such as “HJ” (Hitler Jugend), “KZ” (the German abbreviation for concentration camp), “NS” (National Socialist Party), and “SS.” The Trier authorities are now refusing to issue plates carrying such combinations.
Meanwhile, a lead article in the Frankfurter Rundschau following the bombing of an Israeli restaurant in West Berlin last Friday night in which 25 people were injured, including a 14-month-old child who died three days later, castigated the German authorities for having failed to react on time to many signs of a neo-Nazi ideological and political resurgence in the country. The dead child was today identified as Jennifer Aftring.
The influential daily reported that young people in West Berlin have been seen lately wearing ear rings in the form of swastikas — apparently the in thing among young rightwing extremists.
The conservative paper, Die Welt, also attacked the Bonn government in a front page editorial yesterday for having reacted to the restaurant bombing too late and too subdued. West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, in a telegram to Werner Nachmann, chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, termed the bombing an “abominable attack” and expressed “sorrow and sympathy.”
In West Berlin this afternoon thousands of people staged a peaceful silent march to protest against the resurgence of anti-Semitic violence. The march began at the site of the Israeli restaurant.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
