GERMAN ANTI-NAZI marchers outnumbered neo-Nazis two- to-one at a march on Saturday to mark the anniversary of the Allied bombing of Dresden in February 1945.
About 6,000 skinheads and members of the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NDP) gathered for a so-called “march of mourning” to remember the victims of the bombing.
Police in full riot gear separated the black-clad marchers from thousands of left-wing protesters screaming “Nazis out!”. The march passed off relatively peacefully while more than 11,000 Dresdeners gathered at a separate event to hear speeches from German political leaders.
“The victims have earned a dignified memorial and not monopolisation by extreme-right propaganda,” said Green Party co-leader Claudia Roth.
“When the extreme right speaks of the so-called ‘bombing holocaust in Dresden’, it is an attempt to relativise the Nazi terror. That is the perfidious meaning behind their mendacious mourning in this city.”
Since entering the Saxon state assembly in 2004, the NPD has latched on to the bombing of Dresden as a vote-winner, a strategy it hopes will work again in August’s state elections.
The perpetual debate over whether Dresden was a legitimate war target and confusion over victim numbers – estimates range from 18,000 to 25,000 – has seen the NPD try to rebrand Dresden as “Germany’s Hiroshima”.
This year’s event was organised by the Junge Landsmannschaft Ostdeutschland, a youth organisation sponsored by the NPD to recruit new members for its cause.
Yesterday’s attempt at a show of strength comes at a time when the NPD’s party and financial structures are facing collapse.
NPD grassroots, including the skinhead marchers in Dresden, are impatient with the pace of political progress by the suited party leaders whose success in entering the Saxon state parliament has not been repeated elsewhere.
As well as this faction friction, Der Spiegel magazine reports today that the party could be facing financial ruin.
NPD accounts for 2007 filed with the German parliamentary administration are littered with accounting errors totalling almost €900,000.
Until the party clarifies the errors, parliamentary authorities are considering holding back funding to which the party, through its Saxon presence, is automatically entitled.
If the errors cannot be explained, the NPD faces a fine of up to €1.8 million, which it can ill afford.
Last year, former party treasurer Erwin Kemna was imprisoned for two years and eight months for embezzling €750,000 in party funds.