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NAZIS

Clashes break out in Stockholm at right-wing event

A gathering of far-right activists in Stockholm turned violent on Friday evening as participants fought counter-demonstrators.

Published: 30 November 2018 21:41 CET
Clashes break out in Stockholm at right-wing event
Police break up a scuffle at Friday's demonstration. Photo:
The right-wing extremist network Nordisk ungdom (Nordic Youth) had called on like-minded supporters across Scandinavia to gather in Stockholm and march to the King Karl XII statue in Kungsträdgården park in the city centre.  
 
The event was to mark the 300th anniversary of Karl XII’s death, which is commonly celebrated by nationalists and neo-Nazis in Sweden. Previous events held on the anniversary of his death have turned violent in both Stockholm and Lund and Friday proved no exception. 
 
According to police, a number of fights broke out between Nordic Youth members and counter-demonstrators. Two people were arrested and one police officer was injured when he was sprayed with pepper spray.
 
“Two people were arrested. One for violence against a public official and one for violating the knife law. We tried to separate the groups and see to it that they stopped fighting,” police spokesman Mats Eriksson said.
 
Nordic Youth had obtained a police permit for their demonstration and announced ahead of Friday’s event that they expected upwards of 300 supporters. 
 
Members of Nordic Youth are believed to have been behind an attack on a group of people protesting against the deportation of asylum seekers last year. The group has previously been behind similar attacks and were involved in an interruption at last year’s Stockholm Pride parade.
 
On its website, Nordic Youth says its members are “political artists whose goal and purpose is to provoke and awaken peoples’ emotions” and it rails against “a global power structure” and “an equation and levelling of all cultures”. It says it wants to “re-civilize the West, retake Sweden, Scandinavia and Europe”. 
 
Member’s of Sweden’s more openly Nazi group, the Nordic Resistance Movement (NRM), were not believed to have been part of Friday’s event. Jonathan Leman, a researcher at the Swedish anti-racism foundation Expo, said he would not be surprised if NRM stayed away. 
 
“To oversimplify it, the white power movement is made up of two blocs: NRM and all the rest. It will be the rest that will rally around this,” Leman said ahead of Friday’s demonstration. 
 
Heléne Lööw, a professor of history at Uppsala University and an expert on right-wing movements, said that the importance of King Karl XII’s death anniversary has waned in recent years but he still remains a symbol of the white nationalist movement. 
 
Karl XII fought a series of battles against Russia, Denmark, Saxony and Poland. Between 1715 and 1718 he ruled Sweden from Lund. He was killed in Fredriksten, Norway, on November 30th 1718 by a shot to the head. 
 
 

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NAZIS

German justice contaminated by Nazis in post-war years

Germany's justice system was still filled with former Nazis well into the 1970s, as the Cold War coloured efforts to root out fascists, according a damning official inquiry presented Thursday.

Published: 18 November 2021 17:09 CET
Professors Friedrich Kießling and Christoph Safferling present their report
Professors Friedrich Kießling and Christoph Safferling present their report "State Security in the Cold War". Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Uwe Anspach

In the 600-page collection of findings entitled “State Security in the Cold War”, historian Friedrich Kiessling and legal scholar Christoph Safferling focused on the period from the early 1950s until 1974.

Their research found that between 1953 and 1959, around three in four top officials at the federal prosecutor’s office, which commissioned the report, had belonged to the Nazi party.

More than 80 percent had worked in Adolf Hitler’s justice apparatus, and it would take until 1972 before they were no longer in the majority.

“On the face of it they were highly competent lawyers… but that came against the backdrop of the death sentences and race laws in which they were involved,” said Margaretha Sudhof, state secretary at the justice ministry, unveiling the report.

“These are disturbing contradictions to which our country has long remained blind.”

‘Combat mission’

It was not until 1992, two years after Germany’s national reunification, that the last prosecutor with a fascist background left the office.

“There was no break, let alone a conscious break, with the Nazi past” at the federal prosecutor’s office, the authors concluded, stressing “the great and long continuity” of the functions held and “the high number” of officials involved in Hitler’s regime.

Chief federal prosecutor Peter Frank commissioned the study in 2017. The federal prosecutor’s office is one of Germany’s most powerful institutions, handling the most serious national security cases including those involving terrorism and espionage.

With more than 100 prosecutors, it is “the central actor in the fight against terror,” the report authors said, underlining its growing role in the decades since the September 11th, 2001 attacks in the United States.

The researchers were given unfettered access to hundreds of files labelled classified after the war, and found that rooting out alleged communists was often prioritised over other threats, including from the far right.

“In the 1950s the federal prosecutor’s office had a combat mission – not a legal but a political one: to pursue all the communists in the country,” the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung said in a summary of the report.

‘Recycling’ Nazis

The fact that West Germany widely used former officials from the Nazi regime in its post-war administration had long been known.

For example, Hans Globke served as chief of staff and a trusted confidant to former conservative West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer between 1953 and 1963 and was responsible for recruitment to top posts.

However, Globke had also been a senior civil servant in the Nazi-era interior ministry and was involved in the drafting of the 1935 Nuremberg race laws that imposed the first dramatic restrictions on Jews.

In recent years, systematic digging into the past of key ministries and institutions has unearthed a troubling and previously hidden degree of “recycling” of Third Reich officials in the post-war decades.

A 2016 government report revealed that in 1957, more than a decade after the war ended, around 77 percent of senior officials at the justice ministry had been members of the Nazi party. That study, also carried out by Safferling, revealed that the number of former Nazis at the ministry did not decline after the fall of the regime but actually grew in the 1950s.

Part of the justification was cynical pragmatism: the new republic needed experienced civil servants to establish the West German justice system. Furthermore, the priorities of the Allies who won the war and “liberated” the country from the Nazis were quickly turned upside down in the Cold War context.

After seeking to de-Nazify West Germany after 1945, the aim quickly shifted to building a capitalist bulwark against the communist threat. That approach often meant turning a blind eye to Germans’ previous involvement in the Third Reich.

In recent years, Germany has embarked on a twilight attempt to provide justice for concentration camp victims, placing several former guards in their 90s on trial for wartime crimes.

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