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| Hundreds of neo-Nazi CDs seized in Poland
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WARSAW (EJP)--- Customs officers in Poland have intercepted a parcel containing hundreds of neo-Nazi CDs on its way from the United States to Germany.
Officers in Wroclaw opened the package to find 300 CDS with neo-Nazi lyrics and illustrations, after they were posted on by a Polish resident, named only as Bartosz J, in the south-western town of Opole.
Most of the records had extreme imagery on their covers, including pictures of Adolf Hitler, barbed wire from Second World War concentration camps and a canister of Zyklon B - the gas used to slaughter inmates at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The lyrics –penned by notorious German neo-Nazi groups, such as Hassgesang and Landser – also broadcast fanatical rightwing ideology.
A sample from one of the CDs reads: "We will lay down our lives for the Aryan race/Our country will be free when the last Jew is dead."
According to the sleeve notes the CD also includes "marches and war songs from the European Nazi movement and SS volunteers."
The band Landser is strongly featured in the collection. The neo-Nazis were the first rock group to be outlawed in Germany, when they were convicted for "defaming the dead of World War II" in 2003, with the band’s leader, Michael Regener, sentenced to more than three years in prison.
On Sunday, October 21st, some 750 skinheads staged a protest calling for his release outside the prison where he is being held in Berlin. The irony of Poland being the transit country for his music is that some of Landser’s songs are anti-Polish, with one proclaiming that "Gdansk, Wroclaw and Szczecin are German cities just like Berlin."
This anomaly was already highlighted during Regener’s trial when it was revealed that the sleeve to one of his CDs was published in Poland. Despite being a victim of the Nazis during World War II, Poland has recently witnessed a growth in far right-wing activity.
Rafal Pankowski, an activist in the anti-Nazi organisation ‘Never Again’ said: "It doesn’t surprise me that fascist materials are coming from the USA to Germany through Poland."
"The law is more liberal in the States which makes it easier to send material of this type and in Poland anti-fascist regulations are less rigorously enforced than in Germany."
A police spokesman said that packages such as the one found in Wroclaw were quite common.
"A considerable amount of fascist material is sent here from the UK and USA," said Pawel Biedziak. "Though we cannot talk of a permanent smuggling route."
Bartosz J. faces two years in prison for propagating Nazi material.
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