The Bavarian State Prosecutor’s office here announced today that it has opened an investigation into the Deutsches National and Soldatenzeitung, the ultra-right-wing weekly newspaper, which is generally regarded as neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic. At the same time, today, the Bavarian Congress of Social Democrats, meeting at Bad Reichenhall, adopted a resolution calling on the Federal Government to take steps to ban the publication.
The prosecutor’s office pointed out that it has not yet decided whether to prefer formal charges against the newspaper. A spokesman for the State Prosecutor noted that the latest issue of the weekly has renewed its attack against the “so-called” contention that the Nazis had murdered 6, 000, 000 Jews. Such a claim, he said, may not be indictable, since the law prohibits “only race hatred and genocide.” The newspaper charged in its latest article on the Nazi holocaust that “the Zionists and the Israeli Ambassador pretend that the figure is 6, 000, 000, and speak about it only to get more money in indemnification” to victims of the Nazi era.
A large majority of the delegates attending the Social Democrat Congress voted for the resolution calling for a Federal ban of the newspaper, which has recently been reported to have increased its circulation to 200, 000 copies a week.
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