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Neo-Nazism already widespread in eastern Germany’s Communist era

Updated: 29/Oct/2006 19:44

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BERLIN (EJP)--- A new German documentary has revealed that neo-Nazism in Eastern Germany was already widespread in the Communist era.

The film, called 'The National Front: Neo-Nazis in the GDR', challenges accepted wisdom that the increasing number of racist incidents in the east are an emerging phenomena due to poverty and unemployment in the 21st century.

Director Tom Franke shows not only that neo-Nazis were prevalent in the German Democratic Republic but that they also were generally condoned by the Communist secret police, the Stasi.

One scene shows the night of October 17, 1987, when a thousand people gathered in the East Berlin Zion Church to listen to a concert. When the show was about to end, a mob of two- dozen skinheads entered the church screaming "Sieg heil". The gang began attacking audience members while roaring "Communist pigs" and "Jews out of German churches".

The film shows that, though members of both the police and the Stasi were present, they did not intervene. Later, they referred to the skinheads involved in such incidents simply as "rowdy".

Franke says that the story is indicative of how the entire regime treated the problem. While media in the American sector of West Berlin covered the church attack, local media in the GDR kept silent.

The film argues that, despite that the GDR considered itself a Nazi-free state - its 1968 constitution says that the GDR eliminated German militarism and Nazism on its territory - the first GDR generation was still 'Hitler's Germans'.

Franke argues that leftover Nazi feelings were festering amongst East Germans as a backlash to Communist brutality. He says that, as families discussed the post-war violence, especially the mass rapes committed by Red Army soldiers, they became more pro-Nazi, and anti-Jewish jokes slowly crept back into their conversation. Then came football songs making light of the gas chambers and the increasing use of Nazi slogans and fascist rituals.

"The question is: was this just anti-authoritarian, since the best way to antagonise the state was with a swastika, or was it a deep-rooted ideology," he asks.

Wave of racist attacks

The film's message is resonating across Germany at present as the country asks itself what the cause of an obvious increase in racist attacks across the country is.

A number of attacks in the period leading up to summer even threatened to blight the country’s hosting of the World Cup.

Before the tournament, a black man was beaten into a coma at a bus stop in the eastern city of Potsdam, prompting ethnic groups – backed by a former top politician – to declare that parts of the former Communist east were no-go zones for foreigners.

And earlier this summer, drunken youths flung a copy of The Diary of Anne Frank onto a bonfire as they sang Nazi songs during a village fete in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt.

Most recently, a teenager was forced by schoolmates to parade around an East German playground holding aloft a sign with the words "biggest pig" for having befriended Jews, and a teenager who passed out at a concert woke up with a swastika carved into his stomach by a knife.

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