"Our Fathers Were Not Criminals"
It was May 1st in the formerly East German city of Leipzig. Police lines surrounded the Battle of Nations monument commemorating an 1813 Prussian victory over Napoleon (the traditional embodiment of German nationalism's enemies). Four thousand young people waved flags and banners, waiting to march. Across one sign, brown hands reached out menacingly from red, white and blue sleeves toward a yellow map of Europe. "Dagegen–Wehren wir uns," the slogan warned ("Against this–we are resisting"), turning an earlier, far different cry against American imperialism on its head. Another declared, "Nichts fuer uns, Alles fuer Deutschland" ("Nothing for ourselves, everything for Germany"). Amid the black, white and red pennants stood many with shaved heads, men and women alike. This May Day celebration belonged to the National Democratic Party (NPD), the far right's undisputed ideological vanguard.
The night before, 6,000 antifas partied at a "Rock Against the Right" concert. A scheme to prevent the NPD from gathering collapsed when only a couple hundred revelers stayed all night to occupy the Battle of Nations site. They did, however, drape a banner hundreds of feet in the air down the monument's side: “Faschismus Nie Wieder” ("Fascism Never Again”). It flew all day, a stick in the NPD's eye.
While 5,000 marched through the center of Leipzig in a traditional left-wing May Day parade, back at the monument antifascist militants battled the police cordon in an effort to take a swing at the NPD. At the end of the day the count was 70 arrested, five remanded to custody and dozens injured—a stalemate.
The NPD traces its lineage to the Hitler era. It was started in 1964 by leaders of the disbanded Reich Party, which was itself formed by Nazi Party members not indicted after the war. During the sixties it claimed 28,000 members and elected representatives to seven of West Germany's eleven state parliaments by supporting German unification and demanding an end to the postwar occupation. In 1969 it failed to win any seats in the Bundestag and thereafter lost support to mainstream conservatives. According to the party's current chairman, Udo Voigt, it "lacked a radical ideology." At that time, the left had a radical, if flawed, ideology and set the terms of political discourse, much as the right does in the current period.
The shrunken party reorganized, turned away from mass-style electioneering and towards cadre and infrastructure development. Now the NPD is "the only party in Germany that has a Weltanschauung," Voigt says. "We see man as a product of his genetic inheritance; a product that is only partly influenced by his upbringing and other social factors." Furthermore, he asserts, “National Socialism achieved in Germany more than all the Communist states achieved in seventy years.”
During the eighties, Voigt directed much of the party's ideological training at an education center in Iseo, Italy. A retired Bundeswehr captain, he had joined the NPD at age 16 and worked his way up the apparatus—completely unlike the DVU's Frey. Now 46, Voigt is conscious that he is one of the few members from the generation born immediately after the war. "The NPD is a party of grandparents and grandchildren," he says. It has about 4,500 members, according to Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, although other reports place the number at 7,500. Paradoxically, today’s smaller, revolutionary NPD is a more powerful vanguard than the party of its past. Why? In part because its internal cohesion adds direction to its punch, in part because it now embodies the future generation rather than just the generation past.
Only lately have the "grandchildren" joined the NPD. Fifteen years ago, young neo-Nazis were marginalized, organized in Kameradschaften, local bands of ideological toughs and a few national groupings. They marched on Rudolph Hess's birthday, fought with antifas and attacked “foreigners.” As unification proceeded and the new Germany was born, the Kameraden briefly bullied their way into the limelight before being pushed back off-stage.
The twist went like this: First, the war against "foreigners" escalated into thousands of incidents. The London-based anti-fascist monthly Searchlight counted 75 racist murders between 1990 and 1995. Tens of thousands of Germans responded with candlelight parades against the violence. Foreign governments pressured Chancellor Kohl to do something.
He did. Constitutional protections for immigrants and refugees were rescinded and large-scale deportations began. The government also banned far right organizations that had been allowed to flourish only a short time before. One by one they went out of business: Viking Youth, National List, Nationalist Front, the Free German Workers Party, etc. (Germany has no First Amendment-style tradition and the federal constitution forbids the re-creation of a Nazi Party.)
Despite the repression, the Kameraden hung on, and the NPD began recruiting the displaced activists. The NPD made itself more attractive to the young toughs by sponsoring its own street actions and an international youth congress. Members of the banned groups began signing up as individuals and sometimes as whole organizations. Unlike Frey's DVU, the NPD's skeletal infrastructure was capable of adding new muscle after a decade of party-building. As Voigt put it, "NPD is the only currently legal political party that has stated clearly: Our fathers were not criminals.” For the first time in two generations, much of the ideological leadership of Germany's neo-Nazi movement is at the same organizational address.
As a result, the undisciplined skinheads of 1990 are mature cadres today. They will stand for national election on September 27 only to build the NPD's infrastructure and siphon off the most resolute and sophisticated elements churned up by the DVU's propaganda machine. The DVU's past electoral success, in turn, indicates a voting bloc for racist and ultranationalist politics comparable to the Wallace vote in the United States in 1968. Much as Richard Nixon did with his Southern Strategy, the Christian Democrats will attempt to co-opt that vote. But Germany's multi-party system favors independent blocs. Like Wallace, Frey may also fail to reap the organizational rewards of his own success. When the DVU falters, the NDP plans to be strong.
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