Neo-nazis and anti-nazis in Germany

This video is called German National Socialist Underground & Intelligence Services.

By Victor Grossman in Germany:

How Germany treats anti-fascists as the enemy

Friday 01 February 2013

Significant anniversaries are coming thick and fast at the moment, from 80 years since Hitler became German chancellor last Wednesday to 70 years since his army’s defeat at Stalingrad tomorrow.

Another important date comes in a couple of weeks. February 14 is the anniversary of the bombing of Dresden, which has become a focus for neonazi marches in the city.

Two years ago I joined organisations which had come together to stop the annual nazi marches, with their “hate foreigners” and “Germany for the Germans” messages.

Most city leaders, shamed at last into some sort of reaction, held hands in a mile-long anti-nazi protest – but far away from the nazis’ planned route across the Elbe river which divides Dresden.

After all, the courts had ruled it a legal march, entitled to police protection.

Many took a different view and an estimated 18,000 anti-fascists came to Dresden. Despite containment by hostile police they blocked the nazis, who crept home after an aborted “march” of about 100 yards from the railway station.

All was peaceful until the evening, after most of us had left. There was a brief melee between the police and a small group of militants of the “black bloc” kind.

But the police also broke violently into the nearly empty headquarters of the anti-fascists – and the Left Party – in a move later found to be illegal. The secret tapping into virtually all mobile telephones that day was an equally dubious move, probably illegal.

Dresden’s “city fathers” – also its “mother” mayor – now want no more such blockades, not even fully peaceful ones.

Therefore, after an almost incredible two-year delay, a court has sentenced a 36-year-old family father from Berlin, never before arrested, for allegedly using a megaphone to urge the anti-fascist crowd to move forward.

He was engaged in no violence. It’s not even clear whether he really was the man with the megaphone.

All the same he was sentenced to 22 months in prison, without probation, for “breach of the peace” – longer than most neonazis get for actual violence in the rare cases when they are tried.

The judge displayed his bias with the words: “The people of Dresden are sick of getting visited by demonstrators.”

Another participant who took part in the anti-nazi action two years ago, a Protestant pastor, will be put on trial in March for allegedly “inciting violence.” The intent of these and similar cases is all too clear. Let nazis march. And don’t let anyone stand, or sit, in their way. The left is the enemy.

To make this clearer on the national level Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich has now announced that the Constitutional Protection Agency, Germany’s answer to the US FBI, will continue to secretly observe members of the Left Party.

But not all the members.

It will now keep its suspicious eye on those with “extremist connections,” which means members of perfectly legitimate groups within the party which he considers a danger to the “free democratic basic order” of the country.

That includes groups such as the Communist Platform, with about 1,250 members, and smaller groups like the Marxist Forum, the Anti-Capitalist Left, the Socialist Left and Cuba Si, all of them fully official caucuses within the party.

As one Left Party Bundestag deputy stated, this is a tactically motivated, unacceptable step.

“Instead of exercising humility in light of his party’s scandalous failure in connection with 10 fascist murders, the bombing and bank raids by the nazi National Socialist Union and the insufferable failure of the Constitutional Protectors in preventing them or finding the killers, he is stubbornly sticking to the same old cold war agenda.”

The aim of the right-wing minister is clearly to split and thus destroy the Left Party. The left-wing groups he threatened are the elements in the party most opposed to electoral agreements with the Social Democrats and Greens, which they view as unprincipled as well as harmful.

Others, despite continued put-downs and insults from the Greens and SPD, still dream of a three-party coalition. This line, promoted by some during the recent election in Lower Saxony, proved disastrous.

With a diluted Left programme too many voters thought “we might as well vote for a winner like the SPD or stay at home.” The Left lost all its seats.