German police break up Hess anniversary march

SCHWERIN, Germany (Reuters) -- Police in the east German port of Rostock broke up a torchlit procession by some 60 neo-Nazis ahead of Thursday's anniversary of the death of Adolf Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess, authorities said.

Three demonstrators were charged with displaying symbols with banned racist or Nazi content and further prosecutions for holding an illegal assembly were being considered, an official for the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern regional government said.

A number of posters honouring Hess appeared overnight in a number of towns across the state.

MESSAGE BOARD Germany today

Hess, who committed suicide by hanging himself in his prison cell in Spandau in 1987, continues to exert a fascination for Germany's small band of neo-Nazis, many of them disaffected youths from the depressed former communist east.

They believe he was murdered by his British military captors rather than having killed himself as generally believed. Hess fell into Allied hands in 1941 after parachuting into Scotland in an apparent personal bid to broker peace with Britain.

This year's anniversary of his death comes amid a national debate in Germany over the extent of far-right attitudes and racist violence in a country still painfully conscious of its Nazi past.

Media commentators were quick to point the finger at the far-right after a bomb at a railway station in Duesseldorf last month wounded 10 ex-Soviet immigrants, including six Jews -- although the culprits and their motives are still a mystery.

Despite almost daily media reports of new racist attacks, there is little evidence to suggest a wider increase in far-right violence in the decade since the Berlin Wall fell.

The federal government has announced it will be spending a further 75 million marks ($35 million) over three years to combat right-wing extremism with educational and social projects.

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Federal Government of Germany(Multi-lingual)
German Embassy
  •  Combating Right-Wing Violence and Hate Crimes in Germany
Federal Office for Protection of the Constitution(In Deutsch)

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