German NPD neo-nazis

From British daily The Independent:

Defectors expose plans of Germany’s ‘real’ Nazis

Inside report reveals the violence and Hitler worship of the National Democrats, an overtly racist party on the brink of electoral success

By Tony Paterson in Berlin

Sunday, 8 March 2009

Germany’s main neo-Nazi party pretends to be democratic. But its members hoard weapons, plan to rebuild Hitler’s Reich and are using the economic crisis to try to make sweeping gains in this year’s elections, a new and disturbing study of the extreme right has revealed.

To write their exposé on the increasingly influential neo-Nazi National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), the authors spent two years infiltrating Germany’s far right. They interviewed party leaders and defectors who have since quit the organisation in disgust. “The NPD is a dangerous organisation,” warned Olaf Sundermeyer, one of the two journalists who wrote In the NPD, published in Germany last week. “It pretends to be democratic, but make no mistake about it: these people are genuine Nazis.” …

Some of the most disturbing revelations about the NPD, which began life in the mid-1960s, are provided by former members who were shocked by the violence of its members and their hero-worship of Adolf Hitler. Uwe Luthardt, a taxi driver, was in the NPD leadership for three years, but resigned after watching his party colleagues severely beat a punk rocker who had shouted “Goodnight white pride” at the group. “It was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Mr Luthardt said.

He revealed that the party’s regional headquarters in Jena is deliberately called the “Brown House” after Hitler’s Munich HQ. The cellars of the building contain a weapons cache, and are adorned with photographs of SS men. Party members sing the outlawed Nazi “Horst Wessel” anthem and a song called “We’re Going to Build an Underground Train Line from Jerusalem to Auschwitz”.

Mr Luthardt described how the party is funded by donations from expatriate Nazis and their families who fled to South America after the Second World War. Cash also comes from concerts staged by far-right skinhead rock bands. “The objective is to bring back the Third Reich,” he said.

See also here.

HUNGARIAN police detained top neonazis on Sunday after several thousand extremists held anti-government protests in Budapest on the anniversary of the unsuccessful 1848 revolution against Habsburg imperial rule: here.

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