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Charlotte Knobloch, President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany.
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BERLIN (EJP)--- The leader of Germany’s Jewish community has warned that the rising number of neo-Nazi attacks recorded this year reminded her of the Hitler era.
"Anti-Semitic and far-right attacks have reached a (level) and aggressiveness which reminds of the period after 1933," said Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, at a conference Tuesday in Berlin about the fight against extreme-right.
Neo-Nazi crime in Germany has risen by about 20 percent this year in tandem with the increasing brutality of attacks by rightists, German officials say.
"Those who speak of ’regrettable incidents’ are glossing over a danger for the entire society," said Knobloch, a Holocaust survivor.
She added : "It is not just a problem for Jewish citizens in our country."
Knobloch said authorities appeared "at a loss" to cope with the increasing popularity of neo-Nazi parties that have gained a following among the poor in the former communist east of the country.
She urged police and the courts to take a "hard line" towards extremists, whose message, she said, has "become firmly entrenched in certain spheres of our society".
Germany has in the past two years seen right-wing crimes increase steadily and support grow for neo-Nazi parties as they successfully exploited unhappiness with high unemployment and hostility towards foreigners.
In regional elections in September, the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD) won seats in the legislature in the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, exactly two years after doing so in Saxony.
Knobloch called for the organisation of a national conference on democracy, similar to the recent conference on integration in Germany.
Last week, Israel’s ambassador to Germany, Shimon Stein, called the rise of far-right organisations in Germany "worrying" and said Jews in the country "do not feel safe".
Former eastern Germany
Almost 8,000 neo-nazis crimes were reported during the first eight months of this year, compared with 6,605 for the same period in 2005, officials say.
Many of the extremist crimes have been in former communist eastern Germany with Saxony-Anhalt state drawing headlines after students at a school forced a youth to wear an anti-Semitic sign and another incident where a copy of Holocaust victim Anne Frank’s diary was burned.
A total of 452 violent neo-Nazi attacks were reported in Germany from January to August of this year, leaving 325 people injured.
For the same period in 2005, there were 363 attacks and 302 injuries.
"That the number of violent attacks has risen by a not inconsiderable number is causing concern," the federal Interior Ministry has said in a statement earlier this month.
The new figures show "the necessity of intensified measures being carried out by the ministry" against neo-Nazis, the statement said.
Germany’s domestic intelligence service, the Verfassungsschutz, says about 40,000 people belong to extreme-right groups in the country, of whom over 10,000 are deemed to be violent skinheads.
The total German population is 82 million.
120,000 Jews
The Jewish community in Germany has grown to about 120,000, up from 30,000 in 1989.
The increase has been due to large numbers of Jews immigrating to Germany from the former Soviet Union.
Germany’s Jewish community numbered about 600,000 before Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933.
Six million European Jews were murdered during the Nazi-organised Holocaust.
