After being convicted earlier this year on Holocaust-denial charges, the chairman of the extreme right-wing National Democratic Party now has been charged with inciting racial hatred.
In June, neo-Nazi leader Gunter Deckert received a one-year suspended sentence and a moderate fine for voicing the so-called “Auschwitz lie” at a public rally and for making derogatory remarks about Jews.
The light sentence imposed by the state court of Mannheim was widely criticized in Germany, and legal authorities eventually suspended the presiding judge in the case.
This week, the state prosecution in Frankfurt announced that new legal measures would be taken against Deckert, who was the subject of a complaint issued by Michael Friedman, a member of the presidium of the Central Council of Jews in Germany.
Friedman complained that Deckert had sent him a letter in which he demanded that Friedman leave Germany.
In a separate development, neo-Nazi skinheads in the eastern German city of Potsdam this week badly injured a woman who stood up to them in an attempted robbery.
Last weekend in Berlin, a group of some 20 skinheads attacked foreigners riding in a streetcar, seriously wounding some of them.
The incident prompted Dieter Heckelmann, interior minister for the city of Berlin, to suggest the deployment of additional security forces on Berlin trolleys to combat the growing phenomenon of neo-Nazi brutality.
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.
