Neo-Nazis vow to stage anti-British protests on 60th anniversary of Dresden raids

[Batgirl]

German Neo-Nazis are planning to disrupt next week's ceremonies marking the 60th anniversary of the Dresden bombings, claiming that the RAF attacks were comparable to the murder of Jews in the Holocaust.

Anti-British demonstrations are being organised to coincide with ceremonial events in the east German city, which was devastated by Allied attacks on February 13 1945.


Scene of Dresden after Allied bombing

The ceremonies were planned as a gesture of reconciliation, a recognition by the city authorities that the firebomb raids were a vital part of defeating Nazism.

Yet members of the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD), who were elected to the Saxony state parliament in Dresden last month, have vowed to mobilise up to 7,000 protesters from across Germany.

They will be confronted by Left-wing demonstrators from a group called No Tears for Krauts, which vigorously opposes attempts to portray the Germans as victims of the Second World War. "We believe that it is absolutely unacceptable that 60 years after the liberation of Nazi Germany, the perpetrators are being seen as victims," Ellen Mertens, a spokesman for the No Tears group said last week.

Holger Apfel, the NPD leader in Saxony, provoked uproar when he described the Dresden raids, in which an estimated 35,000 civilians died, as the "bombing Holocaust". The remarks, made shortly before the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, prompted the Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, to declare that he was using "every conceivable method at his disposal" to ban the NPD.

Mr Apfel's words appeared to strike a chord with young Germans, however. In a survey for the Welt am Sonntag newspaper last week,

27 per cent under the age of 30 thought that there was ''nothing objectionable'' about using the phrase ''bombing Holocaust'' in relation to the raids.

Ingolf Rossberg, Dresden's mayor, said that it was almost impossible under German law to stop the NPD from taking to the streets. "As long as the party is not banned, it is very difficult to prevent it from demonstrating," he told The Sunday Telegraph.

Dresden had been left untouched by the air war before the Allies' attack, involving two waves of RAF bombings on the night of February 13 and a lesser raid by US aircraft the following day.

The anniversary events will have particular resonance because the legendary baroque Frauenkirche, the church that was completely destroyed yet is regarded as a potent symbol of the raid, has been painstakingly rebuilt with help from international donations.

Stephan Fritz, its pastor, said that ''ordinary'' Dresden residents sympathised with the view that the raids were comparable to the mass murder of Jews. "There are always people who are by no means extremely Right-wing who simply cannot come to terms with what happened," he said.

Critics of the raids have long argued that they were a vindictive, unnecessary attack on a target with no strategic importance, made when the war was effectively over. Their estimates of the death toll have been as high as 500,000.

Last year, however, a different account emerged in Dresden February 13, written by the British historian, Frederick Taylor. Using municipal records, he argued that the real death toll was between 25,000 and 40,000.

He said that Dresden, which had a solid history of anti-Semitism, was not an innocent target. "Dresden was a Nazi stronghold even before Hitler took power," Mr Taylor wrote. Its factories had been ordered to churn out military optical devices and bullets.

Last month, Mr Taylor had to be given police protection when he gave a talk on his book in Dresden town hall, where more than 80 neo-Nazis tried to shout him down. The far-Right activists claimed that the Germans were "victims" of the bombing and that after the Second World War, the Allies had "brainwashed" them into thinking otherwise.

''The neo-Nazis have made things very tense in Dresden," Mr Taylor told The Sunday Telegraph. It also emerged last week that Dresden's ruling conservative Christian Democrats tried to prevent

Mr Taylor from speaking. "I found this almost worse than the behaviour of the neo-Nazis," he said.

Following his talk, the Dresden supplement of Germany's mass circulation Bild newspaper ran a series of articles and letters by enraged readers which claimed that Mr Taylor was a "scandal author".

Another historian, Matthias Gretzschel, compared the Dresden raids to the September 11 attacks by al-Qaeda terrorists on New York and Washington. Mr Gretzschel, author of the book When Dresden Was Obliterated by Fire, wrote last week: "For the Dresdeners, February 13 is what 9/11 is to the New Yorkers."

Anti-British and American feeling remained strong in Dresden after the collapse of Communism in 1989. An egg was thrown at the Queen when she visited the city for the 50th anniversary of the bombing in 1995 and she was unable to get out of her car.

Pastor Fritz, however, insisted last week that despite lingering resentment over the raids, the ''overwhelming majority'' of Dresdeners saw the attacks as an episode in Germany's liberation from the Nazis. "Dresden was not an innocent city but a Nazi city, like all the rest of them,'' he said.

Telegraph

[USMCRET6391]

who was it who said in another part of the forum that there were no neo nazis on the doorsteps of Eruope? Nuff Said here

[Batgirl]

A show of strength by German neo-Nazis yesterday cast a sinister shadow over ceremonies to mark the 60th anniversary of the Allied bombing raids on Dresden.

At least 5,000 people gathered in bright sunshine and biting cold to hear rabble-rousing speeches before marching around the city whose heart was destroyed with enormous loss of life by British and American aircraft.


Protesters and neo-Nazis in Dresden, and [top] candles spell out the slogan 'This town is sick of Nazis'

Many were dressed in Nazi gear and brandished banners declaring the attack to be a war crime. They greatly outnumbered Left-wing counter-demonstrators kept in check by an army of policemen.

The rally - plainly designed as a provocation - threatened to mar what the organisers intended to be a day of remembrance, remorse and reconciliation.

It started with services in some of the city's restored churches and was followed by a wreath-laying ceremony at the Heidefriedhof cemetery among pines and birches on the hills above Dresden.

The memorial to the dead - most of them women, children and the elderly - lies next to a monument to those who perished in Coventry, Rotterdam, Warsaw and Nazi death camps. Among those taking part were many survivors of the firestorm that in a few hours laid waste to the city.

"I was six years old when it happened," said Helga Schutz. "My father and mother were killed but somehow I survived. I live in Potsdam now but I come back every year to remember all those who died. It's very important to me."

The wall of remembrance carries the words: "How many died? Who knows their number?" The precise death toll is not known. The official figure is 35,000 but many bodies could have been incinerated in furnace heat generated by a mixture of high explosive and incendiaries.

Such uncertainties and the controversy that has always surrounded the bombing operation have been used by the Right to claim that the German people were as much victims of the war as anyone.

Yesterday's demonstration was led by the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD) who last year won seats in the Dresden-based Saxony state parliament with nine per cent of the vote. Officials sat on a platform holding crosses marked with the names of Hiroshima, Vietnam, Baghdad and Dresden.

Speaker after speaker denounced Winston Churchill, Anglo-American imperialism and the liars in the media. Behind their anger is a conviction that post-war history has grievously wronged Germany.

The NPD's regional head, Holger Apfel, complained that the German authorities had colluded in creating first- and second-class victims of the war.

Another NPD official, Arne Schimmet, 31, said afterwards: "What this is all about is trying to persuade people to have another look at history. We are not a nation of assassins. We too suffered our share of victims."

Most of the marchers, mainly young working-class men with a sprinkling of women, would probably deny they were Nazi sympathisers, but many wore black paramilitary outfits.

A column of marchers carried black banners, each marked with their town of origin in what appeared to be a nod towards the regional standards carried at Nuremberg rallies. Others waved black balloons that promised "No forgiving, no forgetting".

At one point it seemed that a clash might occur when a phalanx of counter-demonstrators blocked the march on its approach to a bridge across the Elbe but they were soon pushed back by riot police with water cannon.

As the marchers reached the other side, to the jeers and whistles of the Leftists, a bank of loudspeakers on a lorry belted out Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries.

The extremists' attempts to hijack the ceremonies were denounced yesterday by the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder. "Today we grieve for the victims of war and the Nazi reign of terror in Dresden, in Germany and in Europe," he said.

"We will oppose in every way these attempts to reinterpret history. We will not allow cause and effect to be reversed." Mr Schröder's government plans to introduce legislation that would ban Right-wing rallies at sites that stir up Second World War passions such as the new Holocaust monument in Berlin.

An initiative to ban the NPD failed in 2003. Last night at 9.45, all Dresden's bells were ringing out to mark the moment 60 years ago when the first RAF Lancaster bombers arrived over the city.

Later a night of silence was taking place in the crypt of the Church of Our Lady, the Frauenkirche, which was completely destroyed but rebuilt in the last 15 years and is surmounted by a golden cross, a gift from Britain.

The organisers were praying that the message of peace would prove louder than the divisive clamour generated by the Right.

Telegraph

[Vulture6]

Another NPD official, Arne Schimmet, 31, said afterwards: "What this is all about is trying to persuade people to have another look at history. We are not a nation of assassins. We too suffered our share of victims."

And many of those victims were innocent – on both sides. It is hard to condemn an entire populace for the actions of its government. But when your government engages in "total war", every one is involved. Their share of victims existed, no doubt, but they were as much victims of the Nazi regime as anyone else... not victims of those fighting against it.

However, if that is their stated goal, they have a funny way of going about it.

Officials sat on a platform holding crosses marked with the names of Hiroshima, Vietnam, Baghdad and Dresden.

Maybe they should add to the list: Warsaw, Sedan, Hertgen, London, Coventry, Stalingrad, Leningrad, Nanking, Bataan, Seoul, Manila, Kurdistan, Ypres, New York City… or how about Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen Belsen, Dachau, Chelmno, Sobibor, Belzek, Majdanek, Treblinka, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Gross-Rosen, Flossenburg, Dora, Theresienstadt, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbruck, Neuengamme, Stutthof, Aschaffenburg… the list could go on and on. Do they hold that the V-1 and V-2 terror weapons were at the forefront of pinpoint bombing? If you are going to make a stand, make a stand. Don’t use principle to mask your hypocritical arguments.

Speaker after speaker denounced Winston Churchill, Anglo-American imperialism and the liars in the media. Behind their anger is a conviction that post-war history has grievously wronged Germany.

I believe it was Nazi Imperialism that brought this about, or was it the German Imperialism of the previous generation? Or was it Bismarck’s imperialistic ambitions in the generation before that?

Dipshits!

[cplmpes30]

I said something about no Neo-nazis on the doorsteps of Europe.

I didn't say there are NO neo Nazis, I said the perception of Neo Nazis being the dominant upcoming group as indicated in some posts is wrong.

5'000 idiots are not a majority, just like interviewing White Supremacists on telly doesn't make me worry for a segregated future for the US.

Or am I to worry after all?...