In yet another sign of an emerging tough attitude against right-wing extremists, the German government on Thursday banned the Deutsche Alternative, a neo-Nazi group active mainly in the state of Brandenberg.
Interior Minister Rudolf Seiters said the ban is needed because the group has participated in violent attacks and promoted anti-Semitism and hatred against foreigners.
Early Thursday morning, hundreds of police officers staged raids on more than 40 homes nationwide. The center of police action against the group was Cottbus, an eastern German town near the Polish border in which the group’s leader, Frank Hubner, lives.
Hubner was taken into temporary custody and his apartment was searched for weapons and propaganda material.
The authorities said that large quantities of light arms were confiscated, as well as pamphlets agitating against foreigners and Jews.
This followed an unprecedented move taken Wednesday by the German Cabinet to seek to have two neo-Nazi activists, Thomas Dienel and Heinz Reisz, stripped of their basic civil rights.
Also Wednesday, 24 houses and apartments of members of another Neo-Nazi group were searched as part of the crackdown.
Authorities said their eventual aim is to ban that group, the Deutsche Kammaradschaftsbund Wilhelmshaven, which has been operating in the northwestern port city of Wilhelmshaven and its environs.
There, too, large quantities of light weapons and propaganda material were confiscated.
In keeping with this, Interior Minister Seiters said Thursday that his ministry was studying the possibility of banning further neo-Nazi groups. However, he did not name them.
Chancellor Helmut Kohl, also speaking Thursday, described the neo-Nazi upsurge in the country as “dramatic” and promised harsh measures against the vandals.
During a debate in the Bundestag, the lower house of Parliament, he said democracy in Germany is strong enough to face the challenge and crack down on the extremists.
A leader of the opposition Social Democratic Party, Oskar Lafontain, said that one main reason for the relative success of the extremists in recruiting youths is the enormous social problems in the country, which make many people feel unsafe.
Some 5,000 people, many of them state employees and police, demonstrated Thursday in Dusseldorf against the neo-Nazi violence. They carried banners saying it is wrong to blame the police for the recent attacks against foreigners.
In Frankfurt, a court sentenced a 24-year-old neo-Nazi to eight years in prison for the attempted murder of an asylum-seeker.
And in Karlsruhe, two men were arrested as suspects in supplying arms to a paramilitary neo-nazi group called Werwolf Jagdeinheit.
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