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Death Penalty Campaign

Neo-Nazis Exploit Public Anger Over Girl's Murder

By David Crossland

The murder of an eight-year-old girl in Germany has prompted neo-Nazis to campaign for the death penalty with torch-lit vigils that politicians are calling a blatant attempt to capitalize on public anger. Analysts say it's a strategy that has worked in the past for Germany's increasingly active far-right scene.

German neo-Nazis have seized on the recent murder of an eight year-old-girl in the eastern city of Leipzig to drum up support for themselves by organizing protest marches demanding the death penalty for child abusers.

Leipzig's mayor, police and local politicians have accused the National Democratic Party (NPD) and other far-right organizations of blatantly seeking to exploit public anger at the child's murder.

Experts on Germany's far-right scene say the NPD is a past master at exploiting emotive public issues such as child abuse, drugs, immigration and unemployment.

They say it's a strategy that has proved successful in eastern Germany, where unemployment and social upheaval since unification in 1990 have left many people disenchanted with the mainstream parties and with politics in general.

"The NPD is trying to gain support by pretending to be a normal party and milking the frustration and fear of the people of Leipzig," Friedemann Bringt, project manager at Kulturbüro Sachsen, a government-funded consultancy on combating racism, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "We're concerned that this strategy may pay off for them."

Some 280 far-right activists, most of them clad in black, gathered on Monday evening carrying banners that read "Death Penalty Instead of Therapy" and "National Socialism Now!" They were joined by a number of senior NPD members including deputy leader Holger Apfel.

On the previous Monday around 300 neo-Nazis had joined a vigil organized by a local parents' group to mourn Michelle, whose body was found in a pond on Aug. 21, four days after she went missing on her way home from school. Police say she was murdered and the killer is still at large.

'Despicable Behavior'

"The far-right extremists are now unashamedly showing their true, inhuman face," Leipzig's Mayor Burkhard Jung said in a statement. They're trying to make political capital from this terrible deed, without a shred of decency and without showing any respect for the dignity of the murdered girl Michelle or the express wishes of her parents. This behavior is despicable."

The NPD's regional organisation for the state of Saxony dismissed the criticism as "superficial." "If more and more children are disappearing in broad daylight, if they're simply not coming home from school or from the playground, it's a sign that the system has simply failed," it said in a statement on its Web site. "Our children are the future of our people."

The NPD said members of the far right had joined the search for Michelle in the days after she disappeared and had distributed more than 10,000 leaflets bearing her photo. "We won't let anyone ban us from taking to the streets. We will carry on demonstrating for as long as we see fit," the party said.

Germany's domestic intelligence agency, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, describes the NPD as "racist, anti-Semitic and revisionist" and says its stated beliefs have marked similarities with Nazi ideology. Yet it's a legitimate political party, receives public funding and has gained in support since an attempt by the government and parliament to outlaw it failed in 2003 due to a legal bungle.

The party, which states that an "African, Asian or Oriental" can never become German, got elected to the Saxony state parliament with a vote of 9.2 percent in 2004 after successfully positioning itself as a protest party against deep welfare cuts imposed by the government of former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder.

It is also represented in the state parliament of another eastern German state, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.

Growing Influence

The NPD is riven by in-fighting between hardline neo-Nazis on the one hand and moderates who want to broaden its appeal to mainstream voters.

Its chairman Udo Voigt is in legal trouble for making a racist remark and one of its top members faces court action for recently breaking a tight law prohibiting the display of Nazi symbols.

However, the party did well in local elections in June 2008 and is widely expected to get the 5 percent support needed to retain its parliamentary presence in the next Saxony election in 2009.

"The NPD is benefiting from an environment in which people have become alienated from the established political parties and from politics itself," Roland Roth, an expert on the far-right at Magdeburg University, told SPIEGEL ONLINE.

"The share of people politically alienated in this way has increased sharply in eastern Germany over the last decade. In that sense the type of political opportunism the NPD is now engaging in has some chance of success.

"The party has always seized on emotive issues, be it drug abuse or paedophiles. It always tries to present itself as the party of law and order to boost its support in the population."

The increase in far-right support in eastern Germany, especially among young men with few job prospects, has been accompanied by racist violence. The region has a higher incidence of racist assaults per capita than in western Germany.

Analysts say the education system in communist East Germany is partly to blame because it didn't instil a sense of national responsibility for the crimes of the Nazis, unlike schools in the west. As a result, the far-right carries less of a stigma in the east.

"In some areas the NPD has a better infrastructure than the big parties in terms of local organizations and youth clubs," said Roth. "It has managed to appeal to young people more than the other parties. Its local clubs are often run by respected people such as local businessmen and tradespeople."

Bringt, whose organisation advises parents, schools and local authorities on how to deal with neo-Nazis, is fighting an uphill battle. "In the local elections in June the NPD showed more presence than any other party, they put up more placards and had campaign stands everywhere."

"I'm worried that many people here lack the political education to be able to recognize the NPD for what it really represents. It has become tactically more clever and more modern. You even get far-right hip-hop and rap bands these days."