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CRIME

Neo-Nazis hack into Buchenwald concentration camp website

Neo-Nazis have hacked into Germany's Buchenwald concentration camp website, defacing it and redirecting visitors to a revisionist site, the camp's memorial foundation director said late on Wednesday.

Published: 29 July 2010 08:08 CEST
Neo-Nazis hack into Buchenwald concentration camp website
Photo: DPA

The Internet vandals hijacked the welcome page at www.buchenwald.de, in remembrance of victims of one of the largest and most notorious concentration camps on German soil in World War II, said foundation director Volkhard Knigge.

The site, which was partially accessible late Wednesday, was defaced with slogans such as “Brown is beautiful” – in reference to the shirts worn by Nazi stormtroopers – and “We will return,” Knigge said.

The site includes archives in memory of the estimated 56,000 people from all over Europe who died at Buchenwald in the state of Thuringia between 1937 and 1945, starved and worked to death, killed in medical experiments or summarily executed.

A total of around 250,000 people were imprisoned in Buchenwald and in its 136 nearby sub-camps where prisoners carried out forced labour in factories for the Nazi war effort.

They included Jews, Roma, Sinti, homosexuals, the disabled, Jehova’s Witnesses and real and imagined political opponents of Hitler from around Nazi-occupied Europe including France, Ukraine, Poland and the Netherlands.

Police are investigating the incident.

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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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