Tags:
Journalism of Courage
August 16: Hundreds of wanted posters and leaflets for the "murderers" of Adolf Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess appeared in east Germany on Wednesday, a day before the 13th anniversary of his death.
Police said the campaign was probably the work of neo-Nazis who insist that Hess, found hanging in Berlin’s Spandau prison in 1987, did not commit suicide as generally thought but was killed by his British captors.
The anniversary of Hess’s death holds a powerful fascination for Germany’s small number of neo-Nazis. It comes this year amid a wave of concern by politicians and the media over far-right and racist violence.
Police in the Baltic Port of Rostock said around 250 posters, flyers and other leaflets had been distributed in a number of towns along the coast that was once part of communist East Germany and is now an increasingly popular tourist spot.
One leaflet read: "Wanted: the legalised murderers of the Soviet Union, England, France and the United States for murder. Scene of the crime: Berlin-Spandau. Victim: Rudolf Hess, 93 years old, wrongly imprisoned for 46 years."
Other posters attacked the ban the government is considering imposing on the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), a far-right grouping seen as a focal point for many potentially violent neo-Nazis, skinheads and extreme right-wingers.
Two men aged 21 and 23, were detained as they put up a poster with far-right content in the Baltic tourist resort of Stralsund on Tuesday night. It is illegal in Germany to explicitly glorify the Third Reich but police said it was unclear whether they had grounds to press charges.
As in previous years, German authorities have banned a series of demonstrations planned by neo-Nazis this weekend to commemorate Hess’s death. One was due to end up with a march past the new British embassy in Berlin on Saturday.
A bomb at a railway station in Duesseldorf last month which wounded 10 ex-Soviet immigrants, including six Jews, has provoked a National debate about racist violence — although the culprits and their motives remain a mystery.
Under pressure to get to grips with the issue, Gerhard Schroeder’s cabinet was to discuss far-right violence at a meeting on Wednesday, without the presence of the still holidaying chancellor.
Hess fell into Allied hands in 1941 after parachuting into Scotland in an apparent personal bid to broker peace with Britain.
