German neo-Nazi crime rate sets new high

Mon Mar 26, 2007 8:30PM BST
BERLIN (Reuters) - Crimes committed by neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists in Germany reached their highest level last year since reunification in 1990, a newspaper reported on Monday.


The crime rate rose by 14 percent to more than 18,000 extremist offences, Tagesspiegel daily said, in an advance release of a story to run on Tuesday.

Of the 18,000 offences, 1,100 were acts of violence -- an 8 percent rise from the previous year, it said, citing federal police figures.

In July of last year, far rightists in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt burnt the diary of Holocaust victim Anne Frank, causing outrage among German politicians and anti-racist groups.

In another later incident later, teenagers in the same state forced a 16-year-old classmate to parade around school wearing a sign with an anti-Semitic Nazi-era slogan.

In September, the National Democratic Party (NPD), a far-right group the government has compared to Hitler's Nazis, won six of the 71 regional parliamentary seats in the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in an election there.

The government plans to pump millions of euros (dollars) this year into projects to enhance tolerance and diversity, but it has also cut funding for several existing programmes aimed at combating racist attacks.