Posted on 07/05/2006 10:07:26 AM PDT by West Coast Conservative
German neo-Nazis tore up and burned a copy of The Diary of Anne Frank after hijacking a traditional gala.
Around 100 skinheads cheered and shouted Sieg Heil as the most poignant memoir of the Holocaust years went up in flames.
They also burned a U.S. flag and sang banned Nazi songs.
Germans were horrified by the latest outrage from the far Right, which comes as the country rides a new wave of peaceful patriotism as it hosts the World Cup.
Uwe Hornburg, a prosecutor investigating the incident, said: 'I am appalled. In 20 years as a prosecutor I have never had a case quite so disturbing.'
The book-burning, which has chilling parallels to the 1930s when Nazi supporters made pyres of books written by Jews, follows a string of high-profile attacks by racist gangs on blacks.
The neo-Nazis descended on a field in the village of Pretzien, Saxony, where local people were re-enacting a pagan rite celebrating midsummer.
A bonfire was lit and the book and flag destroyed.
Before they burned the book, the extremists used it as a football in a drunken kick-around.
Anne Frank's diary was written by a Jewish schoolgirl who hid with her parents in a flat in German-occupied Amsterdam for three years before they were betrayed to the Gestapo.
She died with most of her family in death camps. Only her father survived to find the diary and have it published.
It is now a mandatory part of the curriculum at all German schools.
Saxon interior minister Holger Hoevelmann said: 'This is an attack on civilised culture, on humanity and on decency.'
At the Anne Frank Centre in Berlin, an official spoke yesterday of a 'an outrageous incident' and demanded the highest possible penalties for the perpetrators.
Pretzien is in the impoverished former communist east of Germany, close to Magdeburg and some 100 miles from Berlin.
Its mayor Friedrich Harwig, who saw the book-burning, said: 'This happened because our defences against it are not strong enough.
'I have struggled for years against neo-Nazis and they keep on growing.'
Many areas of the east suffer extreme unemployment, disillusionment and despair, helping extremists attract the young and impressionable.
Before the World Cup began, black fans planning to visit Germany were warned that there were no-go areas, particularly in the east, where their lives could be in danger.
In the worst of the racist attacks, on Easter Sunday, a German of Ethiopian descent was beaten into a coma in Potsdam and nearly died.
The warning to visitors came from Uwe-Karsten Heye, a former government spokesman who is chairman of the human rights group Action for a World-Welcoming Germany.
He was strongly criticised by central and local government ministers, but the Anne Frank outrage has further fuelled fears about the rise of the far Right.
I have found the German version of this but it wasn't a big fish in the net, only 2 sources, one of which called the Nazis 'unknown offenders'. The other has a decent report and some words from the mayor of the village. I'll try to translate this version:
Pretzien/Berlin - It is now 20 years since Uwe Homburg became a public prosecutor, but never before has a case frightened him so much. "I cannot remember to have ever witnessed something like this" he tells the Tagesspiegel on Monday. Yet no one had been injured or even killed in the village of Pretzien southeast of Magdeburg. But right wing extremists took the liberty of a provocation that doesn't only frighten the prosecutor. Some time around 10 pm, about 100 apparently unsuspecting villagers and guests of a dance witnessed a re-enactment of a 1933 nazi book burning. Into the flames the right extremist first threw a US flag, then a book. Not some book - it was the world renown Diary of Anne Frank.
The work of a jewish girl that vainly tried to hide before the nazi myrmidons (? DE: Schergen) and died in the KS Bergen Belsen vanished in the flames. An eye witness told the "Magdeburger Volksstimme" that the book had been tattered. The right extremists had played football with it before the burning. When the book burned, the public order office worker intervened and stopped the "Sonnwendfest" (old german ritual, not exclusively celebrated by Nazis today, but excessively used by Hitler).
Now disgust can be heard in Sachsen-Anhalt and beyond. The Bundesland's interior minister Holger Hövelmann (SPD) called the burning an "attack on the human culture" in an interview with the MDR (public television) on saturday. On Friday, director of the Anne Frank center in Berlin Andreas Heppener had called it "monstrous" and pressed charges. At the same time the officials of the Linkspartei/PDS in Sachsen-Anhalt declared that they saw "a grave sign of danger for the civil society in our land". The story hits the party hard - Pretziens mayor Friedrich Harwig, who joined the SED 48 years ago and stayed a loyal PDS comrade after the fall of the wall, was a witness when Anne Franks diary was consumed by the flames.
"Something like that happens because in our land we have not overcome our past" Hartwig tells the Tagesspiegel. The mayor takes a breath: "and because we can't deal with our present time". Harwig assures he had "worked" with the young right wing extremists for years to dissuade them from their ideology. The mayor tried a change through neighborhood. Harwig participated in the Pretzien society "Heimatbund Ostelbien". The board was dominated by an ex-NPD member who invited him to the "Sonnwendfest". Now Harwig says he has suffered a setback - together with a loss of his political home.
In their statement, Linkspartei/PDS officials demanded Harwig to exit the party. "I did that." he says. He would only give up the mayor post mayor post on demand of the citizens of Pretzien, but they stood behind him. The "Heimatbund" dissolved on Saturday. Public prosecution department and police progress slowly with their inquiry. A speaker of the police authority in Magdeburg says: "In Pretzien, they battened down the hatches"
There are probably lots of mistakes, so if something is unclear or needs a background information, just ask.
Conservative or right wing in itself means nothing. Trying to use your formulas like that will gain you nothing.
Long after these animals are pushing up daisies, Anne Frank will be remembered as the symbol of what Hitler took from this world, yet did not take. They'll be rotting in the ground - she is immortal.
I went through it and translated the "Neo-Nazis hijack gala to burn Anne Frank diary" article of a german newspaper. It's bigger and the tone is different. Thought you might be interested.
"Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss."
And people wonder why Holocaust denial is illegal in Germany...
In the 1932 Presidential election Hitler received his support from the business classes, the aristocrats and the monarchists. Hinderberg received support from the workers.
Hitler's party funds before he became Chancellor came from German business interests, not labor unions.
After he assumed power the labor unions were banned, but he maintained the business cartels and strong links to the Army and Hindenberg's son. Meanwhile he purged the Leftist elements of the Party on June 30, 1934.
Too many people confuse the name of the Party and the ridiculous socialist talking points from Mein Kampf with the actual practice of the Party from 1929-1945.
Go ahead, name me one labor union leader that existed in 1935. Meanwhile, Krupp and friends remained in control of their companies.
Stalin was a Leftist. Hitler was a Rightist. Both were very evil mass murderers. Neither were "liberal" or "conservative" in any sense of the term.
But to claim Hitler's political base was on the Left (workers) is simply false. He allied himself with the Rightist establishment.
So the German Democratic Republic was a Democratic Republic because the name said so? It was not in fact a Communist Dictatorship?
Socialists do not ban labor unions and promote industrial cartels and business leaders. Stalin was a Leftist; Hitler and Mussolini, Rightists.
2. The German government CONTROLLED industrial policy, even prior to 1939. Of course, the major industrial players had titular ownership of their companies. They still had to abide by national directives.
I had a political science prof who maintained that the ideological political "spectrum" wasn't a straight line, but a circle. He said that some people, like Stalin, can be so far to the left, and others, like Hitler, so far to the right, that they're standing right next to each other on the curved political spectrum.
Anyway, with totalitarian leaders of whatever stripe, *evil* is a bigger motivator than political philosophy.
Clever. Sick, but clever. (I must admit, I love "sick and clever".)
> 2. The German government CONTROLLED industrial policy, even prior to 1939. Of course, the major industrial players had titular ownership of their companies. They still had to abide by national directives.
Today a state also controls the industrial policy...of course not that much, but effectively on a low to medium scale there was still competition on the german market. As opposed to state run markets. And on a high and elementary scale of industry today corps also have strong connections with the government. Also in the USA.
Thanks for the translation. I agree with veronica that Anne Frank is immortal. However, I posted the original article on a dem website in a thread about burning the flag, which some dismissed as no big deal because the flag "is only a symbol."
I personally maintain that the very nature of symbolism is what causes it to have such impact in the first place. It's like some people miss the point...but not in Germany, evidently!
A good thing.
But they haven't caught the skinheads yet. Isn't it too soon to tell?
a) What happens in [village name] stays in [village name] mentality.
b) The Neonazis of Pretzien seem to be pretty organized. The article gives me the feeling that the mayor seems to have 'adapted'. Even though a large part of the Pretziners may still be decent people (there were witnesses and the festivities were stopped), the influence of the Nazis seems big enough to let the witnesses stay silent about the actual perpetrators.
To avoid Ossi-Bashing I should add that this is in no way typical for East German towns and villages. But the numbers are still alarming. And what's worse is that actually there is not much that can be done for those parts of East Germany that suffer from a mayor economic depression. Manual labor is moving out of Germany, as is Farming that isn't done by the large companies which are ruining the prices for the small farmers. Middle- and Low-scale firms are suffering and closing here, moving where work is cheaper, and the socialist government hasn't left the East much from the start. Taxation that may be reasonable in West Germany is preventing new business from being created, and that is in parts intended because the West doesn't want it's business to relocate. The rich, the young, the able are moving into the big cities and over into West Germany. Many villages are left to decay, many people there live from welfare and look into a future that's not including them. That is a major reason for the nationalist attitude there. You are looking at Germany's biggest globalisation losers.
We were there in Nov. 2004 and I was surprised that - we were told - many food service workers have an uncompensated apprenticeship! They got really huffy if you left the buffet table other than as you found it...don't leave that spoon there...put it back...
And they actually seemed to resent it if you paid them a nice tip. Lose, lose situation...
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