German riots on 65th anniversary of Dresden bombing

Neo-nazis beaten back by anti-fascists at Dresden

More than 1000 neo-Nazis were confronted by around 10,000 of their left-wing opponents as they protested in Dresden on the 65th anniversary of the Allied bombing at the end of World War II.

More than 5,000 police were dispatched to try to prevent the groups from clashing but there have been scuffles on the streets and damage to property.

Tristana Moore has been tracking the day's events from the German capital Berlin. Watch the BBC report here.

Thanks to Sue for the heads-up. :-)

Family memoirs with a Nazi past

Berliner Katrin Himmler was shocked at SS ties and grandmother's connections

As a young girl, Katrin Himmler asked her grandmother about the man in a black suit in a photograph hanging on her living-room wall. Her grandmother didn't say much, but she cried.

The man in the picture was Ms. Himmler's grandfather Ernst, a brother of Nazi SS chief Heinrich Himmler. The little that Katrin's family did tell her about her grandfather, who disappeared during fierce fighting in Berlin in 1945, was that he was apolitical.

Decades later, Ms. Himmler discovered that her family's story was untrue. Her father, long suspicious, encouraged her in 1997 to go dig in wartime archives that the U.S. had recently returned to Germany. Ernst Himmler, she learned, joined Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' party as early as 1931. Two years later, he joined the SS guard, the special unit responsible for carrying out many of the Nazi regime's worst atrocities.

Now 40 years old and married to an Israeli Jew, Ms. Himmler says she was shocked when she found out that Ernst was in the SS. "It might sound strange, but I never considered this possibility," she says.

Ms. Himmler investigated further. She unearthed records of Heinrich's elder brother, Gebhard, and coaxed his children into sharing memories and letters. She wrote a book, "The Himmler Brothers," about her family's history -- and the trauma involved in uncovering it.

Ms. Himmler's book, published in German in 2005 and in English this past summer, is one of several recent memoirs by the children and grandchildren of old Nazis that aim to reflect on how the party affiliation affected their families. Another book, published this past summer in German, "Kind L 364," tells the story of Heilwig Weger, a girl reared in one of the Lebensborn settlements the SS built for orphans and other so-called Aryan children. Ms. Weger was later adopted by Oswald Pohl, a Nazi officer hanged in 1951 for war crimes. The book conveys the pain she felt at losing him, the only father she knew, while being ostracized by other children because of his actions. Later, she hid her background from her own children.

The documentary "2 or 3 Things I Know About Him," released two years ago in Germany and this year in the U.S., shows how the filmmaker Malte Ludin and his siblings wrestled with the conflict of loving their father, a prominent Nazi executed after the war, while reviling what he had done.

At first, Ms. Himmler's relatives supported her determination to explore the family's history. But when she uncovered painful details, they balked, calling her a Nestbeschmutzer, someone who fouls her own nest. Ms. Himmler, for instance, found out that the grandmother she adored had made use of her husband's Nazi connections, and stayed in touch with ex-Nazi officials after the war.

In the postwar period, memoirs of Nazis or their families were long taboo. Ms. Himmler has vivid memories of those years. In high school one day, a classmate asked during a history lesson whether she was related to the Himmler. When she said yes, a tense silence gripped the room, Ms. Himmler recalls, after which the teacher continued her lesson as if nothing had happened.

"I think she lost an opportunity," says Ms. Himmler. "She could have used what happened to discuss the link that our generation bears to the past."

Ms. Himmler, an introverted but friendly woman, who pedals around today's liberal Berlin on a bicycle, met her future husband while studying political science at the Free University in Berlin. His family fled Poland and the Nazis in the 1930s. In the early days of their courtship, Ms. Himmler says, they raked over the past obsessively. They visited Nazi landmarks in Berlin, such as the stadium where the 1936 Olympic Games were held. They went to Krakow, in southern Poland, to see the Jewish quarter where his grandparents once lived.

Through Ms. Himmler, her husband refused requests for an interview; she declined to identify his name out of concern for protecting his privacy. She says her husband never held her family's past against her, even as he struggled with anger over his family's persecution by the Germans. His parents, who live in Israel, knew postwar Germany well from their own travels there and didn't object to their son's relationship with her.

Ms. Himmler spent several years burrowing through microfilmed wartime records and phone logs the U.S. returned to the German Federal Archive in Berlin in 1994. As she dug deeper, she uncovered painful truths about family members, including the grandmother she had loved until the old woman died in 1985.

As newlyweds, her grandparents acquired a home in a well-kept Berlin suburb. To make room for the couple, the Nazis "freed" the house of its former occupants: a union administrator, a painter and a civil engineer. Ms. Himmler never found out what became of them.

Ms. Himmler also found records of phone calls her grandmother made to Heinrich Himmler in 1944, as the Allies intensified their bombing of Berlin. Responding to her pleas to relocate the family somewhere safer, the SS chief hid them in a village in Poland.

After the war, Ms. Himmler's grandmother again made use of her Nazi connections, as she sought to secure an income and jobs for her children. At age 15, Ms. Himmler's aunt got work as a secretary in a factory owned by former Nazis.

Ernst vanished in Berlin in the spring of 1945, as the Allies pushed into the city. The government later informed the family that he was believed dead.

Ernst's elder brother, Gebhard Himmler, in a written account of his life, described himself as a civil servant, barely referring to the Nazi party, and never once mentioning Hitler. During her research, Ms. Himmler discovered her great uncle had been a party member, too. In charge of licensing engineers to work in Germany, he based his decisions on the devotion candidates showed to the Führer.

Today, Katrin Himmler and her husband live with their 8-year-old son in an apartment not far from the Reichstag, the seat of the German Parliament. They talk a lot with the boy about the past. Ms. Himmler says she isn't sure whether he has yet put it together that his mother's side of the family once tried to exterminate his father's.

Examining her grandparents' lives has led Ms. Himmler to question whether she would have acted any differently. "I'm not sure I would have," she says. When asked later how her husband felt about this, she replied in an email: "My husband thinks exactly as I and many other people: that ordinary people are in certain circumstances able to act in a horrible way -- and to tolerate horrible crimes. And most of us can't be sure how we would have behaved in that time (at least if we are honest and not moralistic)."

Some critics in Germany say that recent memoirs seek to profit from deplorable family histories and run the risk of apologizing for the Nazis, by offering humanizing portrayals of them as loving parents and grandparents.

"I'm definitely not apologizing for them," says Ms. Himmler. "It's hard to look at these people as ordinary men and women, but we really have to do this," she says. "They were doing monstrous things, but they were not monsters."

Wall Street Journal

First memorial to black victims of Nazi genocide

In the vast, agonising mosaic of the Holocaust, Mahjub bin Adam Mohamed was simply one more piece, one of millions of the Nazis' victims lost to obscurity without a funeral or a grave.

Now bin Adam is to make history in Germany by becoming the first black person to be given a memorial in his adopted country as an individual victim of the genocide of the Third Reich. A Stolperstein - a bronze 'stumbling block' - will be erected on the ground outside the house in Berlin where he lived.

The memorial will be placed so that pedestrians have to step around it, and its aim is to stop future generations from thinking of the Holocaust in terms of anonymous, faceless numbers. Until now the markers have been almost exclusively established at Jewish homes, but bin Adam's Stolperstein will serve as a reminder of other minorities, the black people, the disabled, homosexuals, gypsies, communists, political dissenters and Jehovah's Witnesses, who were also murdered under Hitler's regime.

The Stolperstein is a project conceived by Cologne-based artist Gunter Demnig. He plans to create a total of 12,000 markers outside houses, giving the name of the person or persons who lived there and the date on which they were taken to a concentration camp. Munich is the only city to have so far refused to have the markers, saying that they would encourage anti-Semitism.

Bin Adam, who was born in Tanzania, joined the then colonial German East Africa services when he was 10 years old and served with the army. He emigrated to Berlin in 1929, where he immediately got into trouble with the authorities by walking into the Foreign Ministry and demanding his outstanding service pay.

Although his request was refused, he decided to stay, working as a waiter in hotels and taking small parts in films. He had roles in more than 20 movies with stars such as Zarah Leander, Hans Albers and Willy Birgel, even after the war broke out. He also taught Swahili at the Oriental Workshop.

He married a German woman, Maria Schwander, and they had three children - Adam, Annemarie and Bodo - but his family struggled to make ends meet because of his excesses, which included numerous affairs that resulted in several illegitimate children. He was still in dispute with the authorities over money for his time in the armed forces when he was arrested in 1941, charged with the crime of 'miscegenation' - racial intermarriage - and taken to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he died in November 1944.

The plaque, which will stand outside his former home on Brunnenstrasse in Berlin's Mitte district, comes with the release of a book about him, Truthful Till Death, by Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst. The book focuses attention on the persecution of black people under the Third Reich, which included forced sterilisation and, ultimately, extermination.

By the start of the 20th century, Germany had extensive colonies in Africa and it is often claimed that German doctors carried out genetic experiments on East Africans. After the First World War, France occupied the German Rhineland, deploying colonial African soldiers as the occupying force. The result was hundreds of children born to German women by African soldiers who then became a target for Hitler. In Mein Kampf, he referred to them as 'Rhineland Bastards'.

By 1937, every identified mixed-race child in the Rhineland had been forcibly sterilised, often without anaesthetic. By the outbreak of war most black people had fled. The few who remained were exterminated.

Observer

Spectre of fascism grows as neo-Nazis go on trial for burning Anne Frank’s diary

Ceremonial book-burning offers grim reminder of country’s dark past

Germany's growing neo-Nazi threat hit home last week when suspected radical right-wingers went on trial for burning a copy of Anne Frank's diary and an American flag.

Seven men, aged between 24 and 29, are accused of inciting racial hatred, denying the Holocaust and glorifying the Nazis. If found guilty, they face five years behind bars, a sentence that director of the Anne Frank Centre in Berlin, Thomas Heppner, believes should be meted out in full.

He said: "I felt ill during the case: the way five of the accused remained silent and Lars Konrad admitted burning the famous book. But I just felt so ill when he claimed that he did it to free himself of the burden of Germany's past'."

Heppner asked: "If that were the case, then why didn't they burn Hitler's Mein Kampf?"

In its statement, the state prosecutors' office said that "by using clear-cut neo-Nazi and Nazi terminology, the men had not just mocked Anne Frank, who died in a Nazi concentration camp in 1945 at the age of 16, but also all the other millions of Nazi victims".

The book-burning took place in Pretzien, a picturesque little town in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt. Its mayor, Friedrich Harwig, says his community has been torn apart by the the trial. Last June a summer solstice party in the town turned ugly when the accused men allegedly threw the flag and then the book into the ceremonial bonfire while shouting chants reminiscent of the 1933 Nazi book-burnings, which were organised across the country to rid the Third Reich of all "degenerate books"

As a key witness, Harwig gave his evidence on Wednesday. He was at the party along with around 100 townsfolk. Following allegations from his Social Democratic Party (SPD) that the burnings were an "assault on human culture" and that Harwig should have attempted to stop them, he resigned from the SPD. He says he will stand for mayor again next year as an independent.

"It was an awful night, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone to experience something of that kind. The answer is to speak openly about things: without dialogue, we can't hope for an improvement in the radical right-wing situation," he said.

But this incident is just "the tip of an iceberg", argues Bernd Wagner from Exit-Germany, the organisation which works at rehabilitating right-wingers so they can get back into "normal" society. Wagner works closely on grassroots projects with a number of people from Pretzien, together with the mayor and community groups to find a "democratic way out of the mess".

The problem, according to Wagner, is that there is a slow but growing trend towards radicalism. The perpetrators are not always unemployed, socially marginalised individuals. "Many in Pretzien have good, well-paid jobs," he added.

Many Germans believe such cases serve only to throw small insignificant groupings into the limelight. Wagner said: "If one tries to use community service as punishment, this is also a problem, because many of the neo-Nazis are fantastic with their social involvement - whether it's organising a festival or being the first to be on hand to assist during the flooding of the Elbe. Social help just gives them another way of propagating their Nazi beliefs."

Thomas Heppner argues that while the law can't change society, he hopes that the publicity will help Germans to see what's allowed and what's not. "Families and teachers must realise the threat of the neo-Nazis," he said.

The case, presided over by Judge Hans-EIke Bruns, is due to end by mid-March. State prosecutor Uwe Hornburg, who has been in his job for 20 years, said he has never been so shocked by a case, despite the state of Brandenburg, which borders Saxony-Anhalt, having the highest rate of right-wing radicalism in Germany. Last week's publication of Germany's constitutional protection report for 2006 showed that the number of crimes with right-wing backgrounds has grown over the past year to a total of 1399.

Sunday Herald