Germany: Nazis march in Duisburg

Via JFDA:

About 200 extreme right-wingers marched in Duisburg, shouting racist, antisemitic and anti-Zionist slogans.  Some carried signs "Stop Zionism: Israel is our misfortune"

Germany: WhatsApp Has Become A Hotbed For Spreading Nazi Propaganda

Via Buzzfeed News:

German WhatsApp users are spreading far-right propaganda through the use of stickers and chain letters, and the company is doing little to nothing to stop it, despite local laws forbidding the use of Nazi imagery.

In nine WhatsApp groups that BuzzFeed News has observed since October, tens of thousands of messages have been sent among its far-right participants. Among them have been symbols glorifying the Third Reich and Adolf Hitler, deeply anti-Semitic images created using WhatsApp’s “sticker” function, and messages seeking to incite violence and threats against leftists or refugees.

The groups have names like "The German Storm" and "Ku Klux Klan International.” At times, between 90 and 250 people have been members of the groups, close to the maximum size allowed by WhatsApp.

In October last year, WhatsApp introduced the so-called sticker function in Germany, which lets users choose from premade images to attach to their chats with the option to make their own. The Jewish Forum for Democracy and Against Anti-Semitism, a Berlin-based advocacy group, quickly drew attention to the surge in Nazi-themed stickers. "As soon as WhatsApp made it possible to create and use stickers, right-wing extremists flood their group chats with Nazi symbolism,” the group wrote in October, asking the platform how this could be prevented in the future.

"These anti-Semitic stickers are unacceptable and we do not want them on WhatsApp,” a WhatsApp spokesperson wrote in an email to BuzzFeed News last November. “We strongly condemn this hate. If a user receives a sticker with illegal content, we ask them to report it to WhatsApp."

But when BuzzFeed News followed up this month to ask WhatsApp how many reports of possibly illegal content it's received since then, the company declined to respond to specific questions.

Read more

Bulgaria: 2,000 torch-wielding nationalists march through Sofia to honor pro-Nazi general

Via Times of Israel:

Thousands of far-right activists held a torch-lit march through Bulgarian capital Sofia Saturday to honor a World War II general known for his anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi activities.

The annual Lukov March, staged by the far-right Bulgarian National Union, attracted some 2,000 dark-clad supporters who walked through downtown Sofia holding torches and Bulgarian flags and chanting nationalist slogans. A number of far-right activists from other countries also took part in the march.

It came despite strong condemnation by human rights groups, political parties and foreign embassies. The city mayor had banned the rally but organizers won a court order overturning the ban.

read more

Italy: Woman attacked in Rome

Via CFCA:

Rome – “Today in Rome: I’m standing in front of Feltrinelli, waiting for a person, a guy with a   swastika on his arm, approach to me and spitt in my face, I was so shocked that I did not even react. He probably did it because I had a canvas bag from the Yiddish course in Tel Aviv, proof of antisemitism .

read more

Poland: Far-right group leads anti-Semitic protest at Auschwitz during commemoration ceremony

Via Independent:

Far-right Polish nationalists organised an anti-Semitic protest during a Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony at Auschwitz.

The small group of hardline activists held their demonstration inside the former concentration camp at the same time as the official Holocaust commemorations on Sunday.

The 50 protestors from the Polish Independence Movement were led by Piotr Rybak, who was once jailed for burning an effigy of a Jew.

Mr Rybak told reporters they were there to oppose the official – and historically accurate – narrative that millions of Jews were murdered by the Nazis with the active collaboration of some Poles.

"It's time to fight against Jewry and free Poland from them,” Mr Rybak said, a Polish newspaper reported.

read more

UK: Racist who gave Nazi salutes and shouted 'child killers' during anti-Semitism rally is jailed for six months

Via Daily Mail:

A racist who gave Nazi salutes during an anti-Semitism rally then tried to claim it was 'freedom of speech' has been jailed.

Catering assistant Joseph Brogan, 27, shouted 'child killers' and 'you people should live in Israel' as hundreds of people, including MPs and rabbis, took part in a march.

As marshals at the rally in Manchester intervened, Brogan continued to hurl profanities and then raised his arm to mimic the Nazi salute before he was arrested.

One of the abused security staff later revealed members of his family had perished in the Holocaust.

Brogan, from Openshaw in Manchester admitted racially aggravated threatening behaviour but later tried to claim he was giving his opinion on 'Zionism'.

read more

Germany: Neo-Nazis use Whatsapp to share anti-Semitic 'stickers'

Via Israel National News:

A group monitoring anti-Semitism in Germany is calling on the operators of a popular cell phone application to take action, after it discovered neo-Nazis have begun using a new feature in the application to spread pro-Nazi images.

Recently, the popular Whatsapp messenger service – which is owned by the social media giant Facebook – added a new feature, allowing users to upload custom digital images or “stickers”, and share them with fellow users.

Shortly after the new feature debuted, however, far-right nationalists and neo-Nazi groups in Germany began using the Whatsapp sticker system to create and spread pro-Nazi images.

The Jewish Forum for Democracy and Against Anti-Semitism (JFDA) said neo-Nazis and white supremacists were using the sticker function to flood group chats with hateful symbols.

read more

France: Jewish mayor’s home covered with anti-Semitic graffiti

Via JTA:

The home of a Jewish mayor in France was covered with anti-Semitic graffiti including swastikas and “Dirty Jew, get out.”

The graffiti were spray-painted Friday on the home of Etienne Wolf, mayor of Brumath, near Strasbourg in France’s east, France3 reported. Police have no suspects in the incident, which occurred on the 80th anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogroms by the Nazis against German and Austrian Jews.

“Mayor Marx = Jude,” a reference to the communist ideologue Karl Marx, followed by the German-language word for “Jew,” also was painted on the house along with several swastikas and the words “Dirty Jew, get out.” Another tag read “Jews want to destroy Whites.”

Wolf discovered the tags early in the morning when he came out to get his newspaper.

“It stunned me. I wondered what I had done to deserve this,” Wolf, whose town has approximately 10,000 residents, told France3.

read more

Germany: Nazi Attack on Kosher Restaurant in Chemnitz

Via Publication79 (h/t glykosymoritis):

  An attack on ‘Schalom’, a kosher restaurant in Chemnitz, took place almost two weeks ago, on August 27th, 2018. The information surfaced only now. The incident was considered serious. Germany’s antisemitism commissioner Felix Klein said “the most terrible memories from the 1930-s are being awoken.”

 On August 27th, Nazis in Chemnitz hunted foreigners in the city center, after a young German man was killed in a stabbing attack. At the same time, about a dozen men dressed in black attacked ‘Schalom’, the German-language ‘Freie Presse Chemnitz’ reported.

 At 9:45 p.m., when most guests had already left the restaurant, its owner Uwe Dziuballa heard noises outside, so he left ‘Schalom’ through the main door. He was now confronted with those Nazis, who were holding iron bars and stones and shouted “Jewish pig, get out of Germany!”, in German. Dziuballa was injured on his shoulder, when one of the stones hit him.

read more

Germany: SPD expresses outrage over neo-Nazi marches in Dortmund

Via DW:

Opposition politicians heavily criticized the conditions in Dortmund that led to neo-Nazi groups spontaneously marching uninhibited through the streets of the city.

The Social Democrats (SPD) on Sunday slammed both the Dortmund police and the state government of North Rhine-Westphalia, which is controlled by Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU).

"What has the state government done to distance itself from the ugly scenes of that evening, to stop them, and to protect our constitution?" the SPD wrote in its letter to state Interior Minister Herbert Reul, according to the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung daily.

The lawmakers were especially flabbergasted because the far-right scene in Dortmund is so well known to police and has been surveilled by authorities for years.

However, on Friday, two different neo-Nazi rallies took place. Footage showed about 100 extremists who paraded through the streets holding flags of the pre-World War I German empire. They used pyrotechnics and shouted slogans like "Whoever loves Germany is an anti-Semite," and "National Socialism now!"

read more

Swiss Holocaust denier Gaston Amaudruz died aged 97

Via Wikipedia:

Gaston-Armand "Guy" Amaudruz (21 December 1920 – 7 September 2018) was a Swiss neo-fascist political philosopher and Holocaust denier.

Initially a supporter of the Swiss fascist movement of Arthur Fonjallaz, he came to wider attention in 1949 when he published Ubu Justicier au Premier Procès de Nuremberg, one of the first works to question the veracity of the Holocaust.  Increasingly active in neo-fascism, he organized conferences in Malmö in 1951 which led to the formation of a pan-European nationalist group known as the European Social Movement and then led the more radical splinter group known as the New European Order later that year. This group sought the creation of a new Rome–Berlin axis to unite Europe against capitalism and communism and in January 1953 set up a European Liaison Office under Amaudruz in Lausanne to co-ordinate the work of affiliated groups. He also came an early member of the Volkspartei der Schweiz but left the party over the issue of South Tyrol (where he was opposed to irredentism). […]  

In 2000 Amaudruz was sentenced to a year in a Swiss jail for Holocaust denial and returned to prison in 2003 on similar charges. However, as of 2005 he was continuing to publish a far right journal, Courrier du continent. 

read more

Germany: When a Nazi comparison makes sense: the BDS movement against Israel

Via The Hill (Benjamin Weinthal and Asaf Romirowsky):

In a remarkable finding in their May report, intelligence officials of the German state of Baden Württemberg wrote that propaganda from the neo-Nazi party Der Dritte Weg (The Third Way) calling to boycott Israeli products “roughly recalls similar measures against German Jews by the National Socialists, for example, on April 1, 1933 (the slogan: 'Germans! Defend yourselves! Don't buy from Jews!')"

The historical significance of the parallel between contemporary calls to boycott Israeli products and the Hitler movement’s economic warfare against German Jewish businesses should not be ignored.

The Nazi efforts to strangle Jewish companies in order to isolate and dehumanize German Jews was a nascent phase of the Holocaust. Hence the boycott campaign against Israel is just another dangerous recurrence of history in a new form.

Fast forward to 2005: According to the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement’s declaration targeting the Jewish state, a key demand is the return of all “Palestinian refugees” to Israel. The “return” of the alleged millions of Palestinians refugees—based on a bogus definition of refugee status—would spell dissolution of the Jewish state. Anti-Semitism at its core is about discrimination against Jews.

The proliferation of pro-BDS activities in Germany prompted Felix Klein, the German government commissioner for the fight against anti-Semitism, to write in the daily Die Welt in August that “the BDS movement is antisemitic in its methods and goals.” He added that BDS’s “Don’t buy!” stickers on products from the Jewish state are “methods from the Nazi period.”

According to the German intelligence report from May, boycotts of products from the Jewish state are a “new variation of anti-Semitism.” This is the first instance of a domestic intelligence agency labeling boycotts targeting Israeli products as anti-Semitic and a security threat.

The following month, in June, an intelligence report from the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate arrived at the same conclusion. “The Third Way’s slogan ‘Boycott Products from Israel’ and … betray significant parallels to the anti-Jewish agitation of the National Socialists,” the agency wrote.

The intelligence agency copied a graphic from The Third Way’s website featuring the slogan, “Boycott products from Israel: 729=Made in Israel.” The number 729 is used in barcodes to identify Israel-based companies, although not necessarily where a product was manufactured.

It is worth noting that the party platform of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union declared in 2016, “Who today under the flag of the BDS movement calls to boycott Israeli goods and services speaks the same language in which people were called to not buy from Jews. That is nothing other than coarse anti-Semitism.”

read more

Sweden: Caught between jihadists and neo-Nazis, Jews fear for their future

Via JTA (Cnaan Liphshiz):

When Carinne Sjoberg dissolved the Jewish Community of Umea in northern Sweden, she knew it would send shockwaves far beyond the small congregation that she had spent decades building.

The move in May owed to intimidation by neo-Nazis, making it the first time in decades that a Jewish organization in Western Europe acknowledged that it felt compelled to close shop over safety concerns.

Neo-Nazis from the Nordic Resistance Movement, beginning in 2016, pasted stickers with fascist imagery on Umea’s Jewish community center, “making the place look like after Kristallnacht,” Sjoberg said. The closure followed surveillance activity on the center by the neo-Nazis, who published details about individual visitors.

“I didn’t take it lightly,” Sjoberg, a 56-year-old Jewish mother of two, told JTA about the decision to close. “I hate giving neo-Nazis this victory. But I can’t bear the responsibility for people’s lives, not under such threats,” she said of her city’s Jewish community of 70 people.

The closure caused a national uproar. Amid intense media coverage in Sweden of the affair, Prime Minister Stefan Löfven mentioned it in a speech denouncing anti-democracy forces in his country.

But the indignation did little to change the fact that in Sweden, Muslim extremism and the far right are part of a broader set of challenges to Jewish communal life. So while the Jewish community of Stockholm may be growing, the problems are nonetheless causing some Swedish Jews to fear for their future as a minority here.

“We have a vibrant community in Stockholm but even here we face multiple threats, from Muslim extremism to far-right violence,” said Aron Verstandig, president of the Council of Swedish Jewish Communities — an umbrella group with approximately 6,000 members out of Sweden’s estimated 20,000 Jews.

read more

Germany: Himmler's daughter Gudrun has died (obituary)

Gudrun with her parents, Margarete and Heinrich Himmler

Via The Telegraph:

Gudrun Burwitz, who has died aged 88, was known in her youth as Gudrun Himmler and was the only legitimate child of the SS Reichsfuhrer, Heinrich Himmler, the sinister chief architect of the Holocaust.  

She was 16 when the war ended and her father cheated the hangman by crushing a cyanide pill between his teeth after being captured by British forces. She was by no means alone among “Nazikinder” in having to bear the consequences of crimes she did not commit, but unlike the sons of Hitler’s number two, Martin Bormann, and “Dr Death” Aribert Heim, who grew up to express horror at their parents’ crimes, Gudrun remained loyal to her father’s memory and spent her life supporting Stille Hilfe (“Silent Help”), a “charitable” organisation which aids former Nazis. (…)

Gudrun Burwitz had been politically active since soon after the end of the war, joining Stille Hilfe and supporting the founding of the “Wiking-Jugend”, an underground Neo-Nazi organisation modelled on the Hitlerjugend, in 1952.

In 1955, with Adolf von Ribbentrop, the son of the former Nazi Foreign Minister, she travelled to London at the invitation of Sir Oswald Mosley and addressed a meeting of his Union Movement party, telling her audience that her father was a great man who had been misunderstood and whose good name had been destroyed by the Jews.

Stille Hilfe operated covertly from 1946, initially aiding the escape of Nazi fugitives over Allied lines, particularly to South America. From 1951, when it went from being covert to overt, registering with the German authorities so that it could raise funds to help “prisoners of war and interned persons”, Gudrun became increasingly active in the organisation. Stille Hilfe is known to have aided some of the Third Reich’s most prominent officers, including the Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher Of Lyon”; Martin Sommer, the “Hangman From Buchenwald”; and Artur Axmann, head of the Hitler Youth.

As a central figure in the organisation Gudrun Burwitz arranged a comfortable retirement for Anton Malloth, or “Beautiful Tony” as he had been known in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechosolvakia where, after beating Jews to death, he was known to comb his dishevelled hair back with his swastika badge.

In 1948 Malloth had been sentenced to death in his absence by a Czech court, but Gudrun Burwitz later used Stille Hilfe funds to rent him a comfortable room in a old people’s home in Munich. In 2001, when he was finally prosecuted in Germany, she continued to visit him twice a month until his death from cancer in 2002. He is said to have bequeathed her all his personal possessions. Another beneficiary of her largesse was Martin Sandberger, the leader of an elite SS squad responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews, communists and Gypsies in the occupied Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, and whom she cared for in a retirement home in Stuttgart until his death in 2010.

read more

Sweden: Jewish group shuts down after Nazi threats

Via The Local:

Sweden’s most northerly Jewish community group has closed down following a succession of threats from neo-Nazi groups.

The Jewish Association in the city of Umeå shut itself down at a board meeting at the end of May.

“It’s a heavy blow. I’m very sad about it, and have even shed a few tears,” said Carinne Sjöberg, the Liberal Party politician who chaired the association. “In some way, it feels like we lost.”

In a tweet, Sweden's Jewish Youth Association thanked Sjöberg and other board members for the work they had done since the group was established in 2010.

"This means that there is no Jewish organisation in Sweden north of Uppsala," it wrote.

 The association moved out of its premises in April last year, after swastikas were painted on the walls alongside antisemitic stickers which included pictures of the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, the text ‘we know where you live’.

Association members also received threatening emails and Sjöberg was even visited at her home.

According to the Dagens Nyheter newspaper, the threats came predominantly from the neo-Nazi Nordic Resistance Movement, which has been growing in strength in recent years, and is very active in northern Sweden.

read more

UK: Former soldier jailed for antisemitic speech where he incited supporters to 'free England from Jewish control'

Via Independent:

A former soldier has been jailed for a speech where he incited people to “free England from Jewish control”.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) initially decided against bringing charges against Jeremy Bedford-Turner, but reversed the decision after a judicial review was launched by the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA).

The 48-year-old, who is well-known for his involvement in extreme right-wing groups, gave the speech in central London in July 2015.

At the end of a protest which claimed to be against the Shomrim Jewish civilian patrol group, his rambling 15-minute tirade included a string of conspiracy theories about Jewish people.

“This is England, this is our land… We want our country back and we are going to take it back,” Bedford-Turner said, before calling on a small group of supporters to “free England from Jewish control”.

He added: “Listen soldiers, it’s time we liberated our own country.”

Most of his supporters were outflanked by counter-protesters, but he reached a wider audience after a video of his speech was uploaded to YouTube.

Bedford-Turner, of Lincoln was jailed for a year at Southwark Crown Court after a jury convicted him of stirring up racial hatred.

He bowed and saluted about 35 supporters including musician Alison Chabloz, who is also on trial, accused of writing and performing antisemitic songs.

Bedford-Turner, who served for 12 years in the Army, was given a standing ovation as he was led to the cells.

read more

Italy: Roberto Saviano, author of ‘Gomorrah,’ takes on Internet Nazis

Via Tablet:

Tired of internet conspiracy theories and vile anti-Semitism, the journalist turns his attention from Italy’s mafia to its white supremacists

Later this month, Roberto Saviano, the renowned Italian journalist, will testify at the first hearing of a trial against 39 Italian neo-Nazis who were accused, among other things, of participating in an online group that incited racial discrimination and violence. For years, between 2009 and 2012, the group held discussions that included white supremacist and anti-Semitic rhetoric on the American hate site Stormfront.

In one of the threads, members of the site posted lists of alleged influential Jews: entrepreneurs, artists, and journalists. Among the people listed, were Carlo De Benedetti, former president of the publishing group L’Espresso, TV host Gad Lerner, and Saviano himself, whose maternal grandparents had Jewish origins, although he identifies as atheist.

An investigation carried out by the Italian police revealed chilling conversations among the members of Stormfront Italy. “I still believe that the great Führer had found the right solution for those damn rats,” wrote Filippo Galbesi, one of the users, in one of the threads. Another member, Alessandro Pedroni, stated: “To build—this time FOR REAL—homicidal gas chambers, applying for real what they pretend happened to them, I believe that would be the REAL FINAL SOLUTION.” All members took part in the discussions under nicknames, but the police discovered and published their names. (...)

Another reason for the online attacks was his participation in a debate on Israel in 2010, despite his openly critical stance on many of Netanyahu’s policies. “In Italy,” Saviano explained, “you cannot have a critical and interlocutory opinion on Israel; either you ask for its immediate dissolution, or you are considered to be part of the conspiracy.”

read more

Austria: Holocaust denier Gerd Honsik has died

Via The Times of Israel:

Gerd Honsik, an Austrian author who was considered a leading ideologue in Europe’s neo-Nazi movement, has died at 76.

The Austria Press Agency reported Honsik died Saturday at his home in Hungary. APA cited “multiple independent sources” in its report Monday. (...)

He published a book titled “Hitler Innocent?” in which he attempted to justify some of the Third Reich’s crimes during World War II. He evaded most of his prison sentences over the years by fleeing Austria and living in other European countries, including Spain. He was arrested in 2007 in Malaga and extradited to Austria for a 1992 conviction, after Madrid had refused to hand him in for 15 years because Holocaust denial wasn’t illegal in that country.

During trial, Honsik claimed he merely “rejected the textbook wisdom that demonizes National Socialism” and said he denies the existence of the gas chambers only when he “didn’t verify” the facts himself. Honsik, who sometimes used the pseudonym Endsik — alluding to the Nazi quest for final victory or “Endsieg”— was last released in 2011 having served a prison term in Spain for claiming that the Holocaust was a fabrication.

read more

Latvia: Man holding poster of soldiers killing Jews arrested at Nazi SS march

Via Jerusalem Post:

Police arrested a man for displaying a poster of soldiers killing Jews at the annual march by local veterans of two SS divisions that made up the Latvian Legion during World War II.

The man was arrested Friday morning on the margins of the annual march of the Remembrance Day of the Latvian Legionnaires — soldiers from the 15th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS and the 19th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (the 1st and 2nd Latvian, respectively). A handful of veterans, flanked by hundreds of supporters waving Latvian flags, gathered around Freedom Monument for the march under heavy police guard.

The march in Latvia, a member of the NATO alliance and the European Union, is currently the only public event in Europe and beyond honoring those who fought under the banner of SS, Nazi Germany’s elite security force. Occurring amid rising tensions with Russia, it is part of numerous expressions across Eastern Europe of admiration for those, including Holocaust perpetrators, who collaborated with Germany against the Soviet Union.

Several protesters from the Latvia Without Fascism group demonstrated against the event by carrying signs reading “They fought for Hitler” and “If they looked like Nazis, and acted like Nazis – they were Nazi.” None of those protesters was arrested.

read more

Switzerland: Neo-Nazi convicted of antisemitic assault on Orthodox Jew

Via Jerusalem Post:

A 30-year-old Swiss neo-Nazi who in 2015 assaulted an Orthodox Jew in Zurich was on Tuesday sentenced to 24 months in prison.

In July 2015, the unnamed man performed a Nazi salute, spat on and verbally assaulted a Jewish man. The assault took place during in the middle of the day during Shabbat in Wiedikon, the Jewish quarter of Zurich.

In addition to his sentence, the court also fined the man 1000 francs, roughly $1058, and ordered him to pay 3000 francs ($3175) to the victim.

He had been previously sentenced to 30 months in prison in 2013 for a different assault. He served only 12 months of the original sentence. An amendment in the canton's penal code revoked the prior sentence because of the latest court proceeding. 

read more