Protesters meet neo-Nazis in Nuremberg

By · May 1, 2008

Counter-demonstrators outnumbered marchers supporting a neo-Nazi party 3 to 1 in Nuremberg.

Barriers separated the 1,000 supporters of the far-right National Democratic Party from the 3,000 counter-demonstrators Thursday, May Day, in the Bavarian city.

The march is a sign of civic failure, a German Jewish leader said the day before the march. Two members of the party’s anti-foreigner initiative were elected recently elected to the Nuremberg City Council.

The developments reveal a “broadly distributed right-wing extremist atmosphere in an entire milieu that is obviously coursing through Nuremberg,” Charlotte Knobloch, the head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said Wednesday in Munich, according to The Associated Press.

“Even 75 years after the National Socialist seizure of power, we are forced to say it again: Don’t let these seeds take root,” said Knobloch, who has argued that the National Democrats should be banned as an anti-democratic party.

The neo-Nazi marchers concluded their event at the square named after Walther Rathenau, Germany’s pre-World War I democratic foreign minister, who was Jewish. He was assassinated in 1922 in a right-wing plot.