Two former members of the National Democratic Party, a neo-Nazi group, were charged last week with espionage and subversive activities.
The state prosecutor in Munich said the defendants, whose names have not been released, were agents of Stasi, the notorious secret police of former East Germany.
The defendants, a married couple, had worked for more than 20 years with Messer-schmitt-Bolkow-Blohm, Germany’s most important arms producer.
The investigators found that the political activities of the defendants within the neo-Nazi group were related, at least in part, to their occupation as East German agents. Nevertheless, they were described by the prosecution as convicted right-wing extremists.
In the state of Hesse, meanwhile, the Finance Ministry has ordered the removal of copies of two neo-Nazi publications from a state-owned-and-operated spa in Bad Nauheim, some 20 miles north of Frankfurt.
The spa has until now been offering guests copies of both weekly newspapers in the main lobby as well as in other waiting halls of the luxurious facility.
The publications, the National Zeitung and the Deutsche Wochenzeitung, are published in Munich. Their owner and editor in chief is Gerhard Frey, a well-known neo-Nazi activist who runs the German People’s Union, a political group with some representation in state and communal Parliaments.
The papers’ availability at the spa was brought to the ministry’s attention by Farzin Borzoui, an activist working on behalf of the rights of foreigners who live in Germany. The order to remove the papers came last Friday.
Borzoui complained first to the spa’s management, but its director, Eduard Alt, said he would not remove the newspapers, as they were not subject to any legal restrictions.
In related news, German citizens are continuing to rally against far-right extremism.
In Cologne, more than 200,000 people held a huge vigil in the town center last Saturday to show solidarity with foreigners living here and to condemn violent attacks against them.
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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.
