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Investigation after torching of Anne Frank’s diary

Updated: 16/Jul/2006 08:32

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BERLIN (EJP)--- German police are investigating after a village gala ended with the torching of a copy of Anne Frank's diary in a scene reminiscent of Nazi book-burnings.

More than 100 villagers had gathered on June 24 to celebrate the summer solstice in Pretzien, a village south of Magdeburg in the east German state of Saxony-Anhalt, with a dance and a bonfire. Details of the evening have only emerged this week.

According to the 'Tagesspiegel' newspaper, three local far-right extremists present in the crowd, aged 24, 27 and 28, threw both a US flag and 'Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl' onto the pyre with one man saying: "I commit Anne Frank to the fire."

The scene was evocative of the infamous bonfires organised by the Nazis in 1933 in Berlin and across Germany to rid the Third Reich of "degenerate books".

At that point, a local official stepped in and put an end to the party.

But members of the crowd then played football with the charred remains of the famous book, which follows the true story of a young Dutch Holocaust victim hiding out from the Nazis before eventually dying in a concentration camp.

A spokesman for Saxony-Anhalt's interior ministry said the celebration had been funded by the far-right group "Heimat Bund Ostelbien" (The East Elbian Homeland Federation).

He said: "The example of Pretzien is particularly alarming as never before had a far right group been incorporated into village life and treated like a perfectly normal association.

"The problem is that there are too few democrats in the East with the courage to stand up to it and prevent it."

State Interior Minister Holger Hoevelmann from the Social Democrat party (SPD) called the extremists' behaviour "an assault on human culture".

And the local branch of the SPD party demanded that Pretzien mayor Friedrich Harwig, a fellow member of the Social Democrats, resign because he did not intervene at the event.

Harwig, who in the past has been accused of having ties to the far-right scene, has resigned from the party but refuses to quit as mayor.

Juergen Falter, an expert on the far-right at the University of Mainz, said it was no accident the men had targeted Anne Frank, who died aged 15 in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, and Germany's chief post-war occupying power, the United States.

"The two acts go together: right-wing extremism is at the same time anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism," he said.

Thomas Heppener, Director of the Anne Frank Centre in Berlin, called the incident "an outrageous scene" and has filed a legal complaint.

Uwe Hornburg from the state prosecutor's office who is investigating the men on suspicion of inciting racial hatred said he was appalled, adding that he had never seen anything like it in his entire life.