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Neo-Nazi Attack

New Arrests Made in Attempted Murder of Police Chief

By Julia Jüttner, Sebastian Fischer and Severin Weiland

The search is continuing this week for right-wing extremist who stabbed the police chief of Passau in southern Germany. The state allegedly provided insufficient support for Alois Mannichl in his battle against a far-right scene that had harrassed him.

Police made new arrests on Tuesday night in the investigation into the attempted murder of a police chief in the southern Germany city of Passau who was at the forefront in the battle against neo-Nazis in his area.

Public Prosecutor Helmut Walch said a man and woman had been detained. Neither were suspected in the stabbing, but investigators hoped the two could help lead them to the perpetrator. Local officials told SPIEGEL ONLINE that the arrests were of two people who had been active in the local right-wing radical scene.

According to a report on the Bavarian radio station B5, the woman in the town of Fürstenzell was seen several times on Saturday with a man matching the description of the perpetrator. Currently, a manhunt is underway across the state of Bavaria and also in neighboring Austria for a well-built, bald-headed man about 1.9 meters tall -- the description given by police chief Alois Mannichl of the man who tried to kill him.

On Saturday, Mannichl was stabbed in the stomach at the front door of his home in Fürstenzell. The weapon used in the attack was apparently a knife belonging to Mannichl himself. According to local custom, residents set out Christmas cake and a knife so that neighbors can take a piece as they wish.

'Left-Wing Police Pig'

Mannichl was seriously injured in the attack (though is recovering well). Just before the man plunged the blade into Mannichl's midriff, he called him a "left-wing police pig" and said "greetings from the national resistance movement." Because of the attackers appearance and those statement, the crime is believed to have been committed by a neo-Nazi. Over the weekend, two suspects were temporarily taken into custody. But both men, aged 26 and 27, had alibis and Mannichl was unable to positively identify either as his attacker. They were later released.

The Passauer Neue Presse newspaper reported that police had tracked the pair arrested on Tuesday based on a license plate number that had been seen in the area near the crime. The newspaper is also reporting that the suspects arrested had been observed by police at this summer's funeral of Friedhelm Busse, a prominent neo-Nazi. At the funeral, right-radicals skirmished with police.

Just a few days after Busse's burial, public prosecutors ordered the opening of his grave after a press photo showed that the deceased had been buried with a Nazi war flag with a large swastika in the middle. The event made Mannichl, already well known for his tough and uncompromising approach to fighting the right-wing radical scene, even more hated among neo-Nazis. Calls inciting violence against Mannichl began circulating on the Internet.

Bavarian public radio station Bayerischen Rundfunk has reported that Mannichl was given little support in his fight against the right by the state. Mannichl hired an attorney at his own expense in an effort to remove calls for violence against him from the Internet.

Defamation Charges

State Prosecutor Walch also confirmed this week that Mannichl had taken civil action against Martin Gabling, the local head of the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), and that a district court in Passau had issued an injunction against the politician. Gabling had claimed in an Internet posting that Mannichl had been "visibly angry" on Germany's national day of mourning, held every year in mid-November to commemorate those killed in war and victims of violent oppression. The posting claimed that Mannichl had stomped on a grave stone, destroying flowers laid there. In truth, Mannichl had merely prevented right-wing extremists from laying a wreath at the cemetery.

On Dec. 8, Mannichl sought defamation charges against Gabling through the public prosecutor's office. "The offending text has since been removed from the Internet page and the case is pending," Walch said.

German politicians reacted with anger on Tuesday after learning that Mannichl had been forced to dip into his own pockets to pay the costs of battling his right-wing detractors. "That is going to change," said Horst Seehofer, the outraged new Bavarian governor who also heads the Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian sister party to Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats. Under current practices, police officers must apply for a cash advance to cover any legal proceedings relating to their job.

The state's interior minister, Joachim Herrmann of the CSU, said the procedure means the state isn't meeting its obligation to take protect its civil servants. And on Tuesday morning, the state government announced that in the future it would offer its help to employees involved in work-related legal cases rather than force them to request it.

Mannichl is currently recovering at a Passau hospital following emergency surgery.

Walch, the lead investigator on the case -- and, as the head of the Passau prosecutor's office for the past nine years, also a frequent target of the right-wing scene -- said the incident had made him more aware of the dangers associated with his job. "You can never be totally safe though," he says. "In Landshut and Austria, civilian judges have been killed for granting divorces."

Banning the NPD?

Bavarian Governor Seehofer said on Tuesday that the state government was also planning measures to combat the right-wing. He promised journalists that there would be a "multitude of measures" taken against neo-Nazi violence and that his cabinet had until "the beginning of 2009" to come up with proposals. "The will range from prevention in the schools to local police activity," he said. He also indicated that he would be in favor of a new look into the possibility of banning the NPD.

Interior Minister Herrmann is likewise in a proactive mood. Police officers, he said in a speech before Bavarian parliament on Tuesday, need to be better protected: "That is our goddamned obligation." He proposed upping the penalties for attacks on the police. When he spoke of the "shameful contribution of the NPD," his boss Seehofer nodded vigorously.

The party's desire to ban the NPD is not as straightforward as it might look. The German government already tried once to ban the party under a provision of the constitution that permits neo-Nazi parties to be shut out of politics. However, the country's highest court refused to grant a main hearing in the case in 2003 because some of the senior NPD members called to testify were government informants.

Herrmann said that any renewed effort at a ban will be carefully prepared. "We will wait until an opportunity presents itself," he said in his speech. In the mean time, he continued, authorities should look into ways to prevent the NPD from obtaining public financing. All legal political parties in Germany are eligible for state money; the NPD receives 40 percent of its funding from the state, which amounted to €1.45 million ($1.99 million) in 2007.

Shortly after Herrmann's speech, the Bavarian parliament voted unanimously to look into an NPD ban. The issue will be addressed at a conference of governors in Berlin on Thursday.

But not everyone in Germany's conservative camp is ready for a new effort to ban the NPD. Hans-Peter Uhl, a CSU member of parliament in Berlin, told SPIEGEL ONLINE that it is too early to make a decision on the issue. He pointed out that the failed first attempt was politically damaging and that trying to ban the NPD a second time is not without risks.

He also pointed out that a simple ban is often not effectual. In the 1950s, for example, the German Communist Party, then known by its initials KPD, was banned, only to reappear in the 1960s as the DKP. "Do we want to ban the NPD, only to see them reconstitute as the PDN," Uhl asked?