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CRIME

Police raid neo-Nazi youth group

Police in Germany staged nationwide raids Tuesday on members of a far-right group suspected of trying to organise a camp to train young extremists, seizing neo-Nazi material.

Published: 21 December 2010 15:55 CET
Police raid neo-Nazi youth group
A file picture of a HDJ camp. Photo: DPA

Authorities carried out dawn raids in five cities on members of the “Young Nationalist Democrats” (JN), whose activities and slogans bear “clear parallels” to the banned neo-Nazi organisation HDJ, police said. They searched apartments in Oranienburg, Ludwigshafen, Bad Dürkheim, Heidelberg and Osnabrück.

“Various blatantly right-wing extremist documents belonging to IG Fahrt & Lager were found during the searches,” the police said in a statement. “The searches were intended to stop the upcoming national year-end camp.”

The HDJ, whose names translates as “German Youth Loyal to the Homeland,” ran

Hitler Youth-style camps teaching children as young as six that foreigners and

Jews were a threat to the nation. Authorities banned the group in March 2009.

The state Office for Criminal Investigation in Hannover warned there was a danger that the JN would break laws at their planned get-together, including incitement to racial hatred and wearing banned uniforms.

AFP/The Local

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CRIME

Teenager turns self in after attack on German politician

A 17-year-old has turned himself in to police in Germany after an attack on a lawmaker that the country's leaders decried as a threat to democracy.

Published: 5 May 2024 12:52 CEST
Teenager turns self in after attack on German politician

The teenager reported to police in the eastern city of Dresden early Sunday morning and said he was “the perpetrator who had knocked down the SPD politician”, police said in a statement.

Matthias Ecke, 41, European parliament lawmaker for Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD), was set upon by four attackers as he put up EU election posters in Dresden on Friday night, according to police.

Ecke was “seriously injured” and required an operation after the attack, his party said.

Scholz on Saturday condemned the attack as a threat to democracy.

“We must never accept such acts of violence,” he said.

Ecke, who is head of the SPD’s European election list in the Saxony region, was just the latest political target to be attacked in Germany.

Police said a 28-year-old man putting up posters for the Greens had been “punched” and “kicked” earlier in the evening on the same Dresden street.

Last week two Greens deputies were abused while campaigning in Essen in western Germany and another was surrounded by dozens of demonstrators in her car in the east of the country.

According to provisional police figures, 2,790 crimes were committed against politicians in Germany in 2023, up from 1,806 the previous year, but less than the 2,840 recorded in 2021, when legislative elections took place.

A group of activists against the far right has called for demonstrations against the attack on Ecke in Dresden and Berlin on Sunday, Der Spiegel magazine said.

According to the Tagesspiegel newspaper, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser is planning to call a special conference with Germany’s regional interior ministers next week to address violence against politicians.

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