Far-Right Party Faces Ban as Its Message Resonates

BERLIN —  On the shabby fringes of this city, a police officer guards a yellow house. A charred, firebombed car sits in the yard and, as the front door opens, buzzers moan and metal gates click. Security is tight. This makes the husky man inside feel safe as he ponders the future of Germany’s far-right political voice for skinheads, old Nazis and angry working-class men.

“We’ve had problems,” said Udo Voigt, president of the National Democratic Party, formed in the 1960s from the ideological ruins of the Third Reich.

Vandals and arsonists are constant threats. But the most pressing dilemma for the 6,500-member party, known as the NPD, is a lawsuit filed by the federal government to disband it. Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Parliament want to silence what they regard as NPD-inspired hate and violence that target foreigners and stain Germany’s troubled quest to atone for the Holocaust.

Filed two years ago in the Constitutional Court, the suit should have been decided this summer. But the Interior Ministry’s bungling use of paid informants within the ranks of the NPD could jeopardize the case.

The NPD says the informers were manipulated by government agents to exaggerate the party’s threat. The court is expected to rule soon on whether a fair trial is possible without disclosing informers’ identities and how they operated.

“This has become a real struggle,” said one government official, who asked not to be identified. “Most people believe there’s a 50-50 chance we’ll lose this case. It’s an irony of this society that NPD offices have police out front and so do Jewish synagogues.”

Losing the case, which has been criticized by some as a heavy-handed attack on free speech and democracy, would embarrass Schroeder. After a spate of right-wing violence and immigrant murders in 1999 and 2000, the chancellor called for an “uprising of the upright.” He said outlawing the NPD, which had gradually allied itself with a younger generation of skinheads and neo-Nazis from eastern Germany, would be an act of “political hygiene.”

As the case sits unresolved, recent polls suggest that this nation of 83 million is again witnessing strong and, on some issues, growing anti-Semitism and prejudice against immigrants.

To an increasing degree, anti-Semitism is rooted in disdain for Israeli military crackdowns on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. During Germany’s federal election campaign in September, Juergen Moellemann, former deputy chairman of the Free Democratic Party, tried to attract far-right voters by making what were widely seen as veiled anti-Semitic comments. He also supported a fellow politician who characterized Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as using “Nazi methods” to battle Palestinians.

Moellemann’s tactics troubled the establishment because they emerged from a mainstream organization. Some, however, believe he and others expressing similar views were turned into scapegoats for raising legitimate criticisms of Israeli policy.

“It’s always the Jews,” said Horst Mahler, a longtime leftist turned right-wing sympathizer and lawyer for the NPD. “They define who is an anti-Semite. If they say when you criticize Sharon and what’s going on in Palestine, you’re an anti-Semite, then I say, ‘Yes I am.’ But what does it mean?”

The wider problem of anti-Semitism and xenophobia emanates from German fears of unemployment, a collapsed economy and the perceptions that foreigners are exploiting the welfare state and that Germany’s pride and identity are melting away in a world of increased globalization.

These elements have been around for years, but they have acquired an urgency as neo-Nazis and nationalists confront a government they view as too apologetic for sins of the past.

In a poll published last month, 22% of respondents said Jews have too much influence on society, 17% said they are partly responsible for anti-Semitism and 52% said they take advantage of Germany’s guilt over World War II.

The poll, by the Institute of Conflict Research at Bielefeld University, also found that 52% of men and 58% of women said the nation has too many foreigners, and 24% of men and 31% of women believed foreigners should be deported in times of high unemployment.

During the naming recently of a Berlin street in honor of Jews, a small crowd began chanting, “Jews go home!” Hate mail to prominent Jews is on the rise, according to Jewish groups. Calling it a “document of hate,” the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung refused to publish excerpts of Martin Walser’s popular German novel “Death of a Critic,” in which a writer fantasizes about the demise of his Jewish nemesis.

“There are no thresholds of restraint anymore,” Wolfgang Benz, a scholar on anti-Semitism, wrote recently in the Berliner Zeitung. Many Germans are “reaching into the box of prejudice.... People used to privately degrade Jews in the back rooms of pubs. Today, they defame them in public with no inhibitions.”

“People feel more emboldened to express anti-Semitic attitudes,” said Deidre Berger, managing director of the American Jewish Committee office in Berlin. “It has to do with the repositioning of Germany within Europe. Without the Cold War, a lot of mental barriers have fallen.”

Parliament is attempting to diffuse hate. In May, it issued a tough report designed to curb discrimination and anti-Semitism. The government last month awarded the Central Council of German Jews the same legal status as Roman Catholic and Protestant churches. This will triple the amount of funding to Jewish schools and institutions to $3 million a year. It is a recognition of Germany’s growing Jewish population, which has jumped from 30,000 in 1990 to about 100,000 today.

The harsh denunciations of Moellemann’s comments also show, according to politicians and sociologists, that although anti-Semitism might creep into discourse, it will quickly be rejected. For the last decade, German leaders have kept the country mindful of its past but have not allowed that to become an impediment to the nation’s ascension on the world stage.

“A political party that uses the anti-Semitic ticket cannot survive,” said Hajo Funke, author of “Paranoia and Politics: Right-Wing Extremism in the Berlin Republic.” “The majority of mainstream Germans don’t want anything to do with it.”

The NPD, however, occupies the angry edges of politics. The party, which in 1969 received its best electoral showing with 4.3% of the vote, has been searching for regeneration as its old guard dies out. In recent years, the party has mastered the Internet. It has embraced young, often violent neo-Nazis.

“The young feel hopeless,” said Voigt, the party president, speaking methodically over coffee amid binders of court documents. “We tell them you don’t have to accept this fate. They are the victims of capitalism, and our present government is in collaboration with Western allies. Our government bows to the U.S. We have a huge foreign population. We are against interracial marriage. Our genes will be changed. Our German virtues will be destroyed. We have to repair the reeducation done to our people after the war. They tried to strip us of our dignity. They told the young they were children of criminals.”

The attempt to ban the NPD, Voigt said, reveals the government’s fear that the party’s beliefs are held -- even if privately -- by a growing number of Germans. In recent elections in two states, the NPD received more than 20% of the ballots from first-time voters. Nationwide, however, the party received about 1%.

Voigt’s dual strategy is to gain in the polls and to “fight to win the street” in a bid to benefit from the dozens of demonstrations held each year by neo-Nazis and skinheads.

The NPD’s platform -- including a plan to deport foreigners -- coincided with two shifts in society: the rising anger of unemployed, xenophobic youths from eastern Germany and debates over anti-Semitism and the nation’s atonement for crimes against Jews.

Right-wing violence also increased, especially in the east, where unemployment is 20%. In 1998, according to Germany’s Office to Protect the Constitution, police investigated 708 violent hate crimes. That figure rose to 746 in 1999 and jumped to 998 in 2000. One of the most shocking cases occurred in Guben in 1999, when thugs drove an Algerian asylum-seeker through a glass door and drank beer while he bled to death.

Public pressure reduced the number of cases to more than 700 last year, but the Interior Ministry said it was disturbed by a sharp rise in hard-core neo-Nazi groups’ membership from 2,200 to 2,800. Violence figures are expected to rise this year.

Voigt estimates that the government has at least 30 informers working in party offices across the country. He said the government pressures its “spies” to exacerbate violence and anti-Semitism in a bid to win public support for outlawing the party. The Interior Ministry denies the allegation. But the government often quotes the writings and cites the actions of NPD members doubling as informers.

One is Wolfgang Frenz, whose 1998 book included lines such as “If there would not have been an Auschwitz, it should be invented for the Jews of today.”

Voigt said he doesn’t preach violence or hate.

“I tell the young ones that any baseball bat against a foreigner is a kick against Germany,” he said. “There are tens of thousands of skinheads in Germany. We can’t ignore them. We didn’t make the skinheads; this country produced them.”