March of the World Cup Nazis
By DAVID JONES, Daily Mail
Racial hatred, brutal beatings and murders. Hitler´s Reich? No, modern
Germany just 12 weeks before the World Cup. No wonder black Britons are
being told their lives are at risk…
With its cobbled streets, ornamental gardens, and a magnificent palace
built by Frederick the Great, Potsdam is a see destination for World Cup
fans wishing to absorb some German culture between football matches.
Shamefully, however, this affluent old university town, nestling on the
southern fringes of Berlin — the venue for six matches including the
final on July 9 — has been declared too dangerous for non-white
supporters to risk visiting.
It is named on a list of no-go areas, drawn up for the safety of black
people planning to attend the tournament, following a series of vicious
racially-motivated attacks in the states of former East Germany.
The latest occurred four weeks ago. Walking home late at night, Ermyas
Mulugeta, a 37-year-old Ethiopian working in Potsdam as an engineer, was
accosted and abused by two burly neo-Nazi thugs.
The German government is playing down the Nazi threat.
Terrified, he used his mobile phone to call his wife for help, but she
was asleep and what followed was recorded on the answering machine. ´Why
are you calling me a pig? Why are you calling me a n****r?´ Mr Mulugeta
is heard to ask tremulously, on a tape which shocked the nation when it
was later replayed on TV news bulletins. The response is a flurry of
further racial insults, interspersed by ago-nised groans and the dull
thud of kicks.
According to doctors, just one more blow to the head would have killed
Mr Mulugeta. This week, mercifully, he emerged from a coma, but he
remains in a wheelchair, his chances of a full recovery uncertain. For
the World Cup hosts, this horrendous, highly-publicised attack on a
decent man in an outwardly respectable area could not have been more
inopportune.
If we believe the ubiquitous World Cup motto, this summer had promised
to be ´A Time to Make Friends´. But according to the chilling headline
in one leading German newspaper, for non-white supporters it now
threatens a different experience — ´A Time to Meet Nazis´.
Fears that the hoped-for sporting idyll will be marred by Far Right
extremists first surfaced soon after the Potsdam attack, when the Africa
Council — which represents the interests of Africans in Germany —
published its no-go area list. Some of the places deemed unsafe for
black fans, such as tough, working-class white suburbs of Berlin and
Leipzig (another World Cup venue) were predictable enough.
Yet the inclusion of Potsdam and other outwardly tranquil towns — some
of which feature on the officially-recommended World Cup tourist trail
through the eastern states of Brandenburg, Saxony, and Saxony-Anhalt —
was as embarrassing as it was alarming.
Understandably, the German federal government and football association
are trying to play down the threat, which has cast a cloud over the
pre-tournament hype. Yesterday, in a frightening escalation, apparently
timed to scare off prospective World Cup tourists, three serious racial
attacks were reported in the towns of Weimar and Wismar — and the
capital itself.
The victims were from Mozambique, Cuba, India and Turkey. The thugs who
beat up the Turkish man shouted: ´Adolf Hitler was our friend! He stood
by us to the end!´ To stoke up the tension, Far Right activists have
applied to stage a march in Leipzig to coincide with the match between
Angola and Iran — whose president is a Holocaust denier. And the
Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD), Germany´s equivalent of
the British National Party, will host an international gathering on the
tournament´s opening day, June 9.
Germany has witnessed 133 race murders since the Berlin wall fell.
Earlier, the Africa Council´s claims were endorsed by a high-profile
former government spokesman, Uwe-Karsten Haye. ´There are small and
mid-sized towns in the state of Brandenburg, and other places, where I
would not advise anyone with a different skin colour to go,´ warned Mr
Haye, who now heads a human rights group. Grimly, he added: ´They would
probably not get out alive.´
Football chiefs and politicians who accuse him of scare-mongering should
check the statistics. In the 16 years since the Berlin Wall fell,
Germany has witnessed 133 race murders according to the Amadeu Antonio
Foundation, an anti-Nazi organisation named after the first victim. In
2004, the most recent year for which figures are available, there were
766 violent crimes against nonwhite Germans with ´Right-wing
motivation´, including 640 beatings, six attempted murders, and several
arson attacks.
These shockingly high numbers occurred, we should remember, in a country
whose immigrant population is only around three million (mainly of
Turkish ethnicity) out of a total of more than 82 million — a relatively
small percentage compared with that of Britain. Proportionally, the
great majority of attacks take place in the former East Germany, where
ethnic minorities are 23 times more likely to be attacked for the colour
of their skin than in West Germany.
Annetta Kahane, head of the Amadeu project, describes a region riven
with ´Ku Klux Klan towns and cities´. ´In such places, the old National
Socialist values and traditions are endemic,´ she told me. ´They are
handed down from parents to children at the dinner table. They are so
deeply embedded in the fabric of the community that they are the norm.´
Travelling along the World Cup sightseeing route this week, from Berlin
down through the heartland of these embattled, ultra-nationalistic
enclaves, I found this to be frighteningly true. In the pretty village
of Pommelte, near Magdeburg, four youths fidgeted on a wooden court
bench last Monday as Judge Peggy Bos described how, for 75 minutes, they
tortured 12-year-old Kevin Khune.
The Ethiopian-German lad was abducted as he got off a bus and
frogmarched to a quiet spot. The gang´s leader, Francesco Lenz, a
weedy-looking 20-year-old who called himself The Night Frightener, told
the boy: ´My village was clean for 20 years — until you came along!´
Then he and his three skinhead cronies, all aged 16, spat and urinated
on Kevin, racially abused him and forced him to lick their boots.
They ordered him to repeat the mantra: ´A real German is tall and blonde
with blue eyes,´ apparently forgetting that they did not remotely
conform to this Arian stereotype.
They bombarded him with questions, such as ´when are you leaving the
country?´ and if he answered wrongly, took turns to thump, kick,
throttle, bottle and head-butt him.
Finally, Lenz, the most sadistic, stubbed out a cigarette on Kevin´s
face, close to his eye. He drew out a gun and feigned to shoot him
before leaving him, barely recognisable, to stumble back to his home.
Listening to this depressing litany, in a crowded small town courthouse
last week, one imagined that the perpetrators must have been among a
tiny minority of social misfits. Sadly, this is far from the truth.
Repressed nationalist sentiment has exploded to the surface.
Even by the cautious estimate of the Federal Office for the Protection
of the Constitution, some 40–50,000 hard-core Far Right extremists are
active in Germany.
And Exit, the organisation which helps people to escape the cloying
Neo-Nazi scene, estimates that a further 200,000 are loosely associated
with them, attending social events and rallies, dancing to music by
hate-mongering bands such as Lancer, and reading their literature.
They operate at various levels, from drunken, xenophobic skinheads who
take spontaneous pleasure i
n bashing foreigners (ludicrously blamed for
all East Germany´s ills) to highly-organised politicos plotting to
return Germany to its ´glorious´ past.
Like many thugs who prowl the no-go areas, Lenz and his crew fell
somewhere in between.
They were hardly big-time players, yet they were serious enough to have
immersed themselves in Nazi ideology and formed their own Kamaradschaft,
or small, informal cell.
They also exerted influence over other village youths, who mourned
outside the court after they were sentenced (Lenz received three years
and six months in custody).
But in a country which has suffered so deeply in the name of Nazism, why
were they drawn to its cause?
First, experts say, the old communist regime was so determined to
obliterate its own past that anti-Semitism, racism and other
proclivities of National Socialism were never tackled — just ignored and
denied as if they never happened.
At the same time, people were so restricted — and so much under the
thumb of the Soviet Union — that, in the privacy of their homes, they
lamented the Thirties, when Germany was proud, strong — and above all
independent.
The moment the Wall came down, this repressed nationalist sentiment
exploded to the surface.
But there were other factors. Though the German Democratic Republic
permitted 160,000 nonwhites to work there, under agreements with
communist countries such as Vietnam, Cuba and Angola, a system of
virtual apartheid prevailed.
Black workers were forced to live as third-class subjects in grim
dormitory blocks. They were forbidden from socialising with Germans, and
women who fell pregnant by a German were forced to have an abortion.
So the Third Reich doctrine of a superior white master-race was
perpetuated. After reunification, the government´s answer was to employ
an army of social workers, tasked with reeducating the brainwashed
Easterners to think like members of a modern tolerant democracy.
A fresh generation of Germans regard National Socialism as a fashion
statement.
Ironically, many of these newly-trained community workers were
themselves ingrained with the old Eastern ideology — and the expensive
social engineering plan failed.
Matthias Adrian, 30, a senior figure in the extreme-Right NPD´s
notorious Youth Wing until he defected five years ago to join Exit,
explained how he rose through the ranks.
Born into a Bavarian family with strong military traditions, both his
grandfathers fought in World War II. At family gatherings, when the beer
flowed, they would reminisce fondly about their fighting days.
Adrian was shocked and confused, therefore, at the age of nine, when his
schoolteacher — who belonged to the new liberal-Left — showed his class
pictures of Holocaust victims.
That night, he confronted his grandfather, who assured him his teacher
had exaggerated. Most German soldiers had behaved honourably, he said,
adding in a whisper: ´Anyway, the Jews killed Jesus.´
Forced to choose between his teacher and beloved grandpa, Adrian sided
with the old soldier. By the time he was 13, he was reading the National
Newspaper, a Neo-Nazi propaganda sheet, and his most treasured book was
an illustrated eulogy to the SS.
´When my school discovered this, they sent me to special correction
classes, but they only made me want to rebel more,´ he says. ´Some other
kids followed me, and we started wearing brown shirts like the Hitler
Youth. We called ourselves the Combat Sports Group, and I was the
Hauptsturmfuhrer (Major).´
>From daubing a local corn silo with swastikas, 20-year-old Adrian — by
now sporting a Hitler moustache — joined the Youth NPD, rising to
second-in-command of Hessen state.
Like other members, he also joined a secret organisation called Free
Corps Great Germany. This paramilitary group has a fierce National
Socialist ideology and its members undergo combat training in readiness
for the envisaged neo-Nazi revolution.
´I was educated to use Uzi and MG42 machine-guns at camps in
Switzerland,´ he recalls ´But my real role was to disseminate propaganda.
´We believed our time would come after Germany was engulfed by race
riots. I was issued with a list of 200 prominent Germans, whom my
section was supposed to assassinate when the revolution came.´
Adrian eventually became disillusioned with the debauchery and
corruption in the NPD. He claims its youth leader cavorted with
prostitutes and that funds disappeared.
Today, having recovered from a nervous breakdown precipitated by his
realisation that the extreme-Right wing beliefs he had espoused were
wrong, one of his tasks is to go into schools and warn gullible
teenagers against following his path.
He has found that the movement is attracting a fresh generation of
Germans, who regard National Socialism as a fashion statement. These
young fascists dye their hair and wear stylish clothes designed by their
label of choice, Thorsteiner.
The NPD woos them with its own mail-order catalogue — raking in a tidy
profit in the process. Items on offer include perfume purporting to
smell of ´real German men´, SS uniforms and coats (minus the sinister
rune symbols, which are illegal under anti-Nazi laws), and female
underwear bearing saucy, patriotic slogans.
Meanwhile, the threat from the ´ultras´ — old-style football thugs who
cause mayhem in and around the stadiums of lower-division teams in the
East — should not be ignored.
Last Saturday, I attended an end-of-season booze-up at Chemnitz football
club, whose notoriously racist fans recently ran amok in Hamburg
wrecking Turkish shops, waving Nazi flags and chanting their favourite
song, about building a tunnel from their opponents´ stadium to the
gas-chambers of Auschwitz.
I was introduced to Thomas Haller, 41, a 20st, gold jewellery-laden
father of six, who boasts of being jailed several times for football
violence, and leads the Chemnitz boys into combat.
Not, he is it pains to stress, inside his own stadium — which he and his
black-clad ´security´ goons are employed by the club to protect — but at
pre-arranged battle grounds, such as forests and car parks.
Haller, who hopes to attend the World Cup games, tells me he ´can´t
stand´ black players, even though Chemnitzer FC has a Nigerian
centre-forward. As for racist chanting, he believes it is part of the game.
´The African people can come as our guests — so long as they behave,´ he
says. ´But if they start giving people drugs or looking at our women,
then they are going to get problems.´
When a football club pays a bigoted yob such as Haller to enforce good
behaviour, one understands why some now question Germany´s right to host
the World Cup at all.
Deservedly or otherwise, however, football´s rainbow of nations will
decamp here in 13 days´ time.
The final will be played in the impressive Berlin stadium built by
Hitler for the infamous 1936 Olympics, where Jesse Owens belied the myth
of ´white supremacy´.
Seventy years on, we must hope sport brings a divided world closer
together, and that when the last whistle sounds, the only colour worthy
of mention is that of victorious team´s shirts.
