'Anonymous' declares 'Blitzkrieg' on neo-Nazis

“Anonymous” hackers have declared “Blitzkrieg” on neo-Nazis for the New Year, disabling a number of their websites and publishing lists of extreme-right supporters.

A “Nazi-Leaks” portal has appeared on the internet listing hundreds of names of people subscribed to various shops selling far-right clothing, as well as writers for the Junge Freiheit newspaper which carries contributions from far-right commentators. The hackers say they have managed to close down 15 websites associated with the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD), the Frankfurter Rundschau reported on Monday. They have reportedly called their campaign "Operation Blitzkrieg".

The paper said that the German version of the neo-Nazi internet platform “Altermedia” was at times offline. A Twitter message addressed to those trying to get into the site wished “all Nazis and in particular Altermedia a good start to the New Year.”

This was greeted by a message reported by left-wing websites as coming from Altermedia calling for information about the hackers, and offering to reward useful tips with the hackers' “amputated fingers.” The Frankfurter Rundschau said it could not check whether the comment was really from Altermedia as the site was offline.

Long lists of names, some with addresses, purporting to be customer registers of firms such as the infamous Thor Steinar clothing firm were posted on the “Nazi-Leaks” portal.

People listed on the portal as having written for the Junge Freiheit newspaper included Peter Scholl-Latour, according to the Frankfurter Rundschau. He is a respected journalist and Afghanistan expert who has written for, among other publications, the Stern magazines.

The Local

Thanks to Anon for the heads-up

German Mayor in Hiding after Far-Right Threat

The mayor of a small town in eastern Germany has gone into hiding after a threat on his life appeared on a far-right Web site. The case follows the knife attack by a suspected neo-Nazi this month, generating fears that the far-right scene is becoming more violent.

The mayor of the small town of Warin in eastern Germany has gone into hiding after a threat against him appeared on a far-right Web site.

Hans-Peter Gossel, 53, has been under police protection for a week after the following entry appeared on Altermedia, a Web site popular with neo-Nazis: "Watch out!!! It's high time for Lebkuchen cake knives!! The next 'victim' is making himself available! Gossel?" Gossel said the Web site also contained a video showing a matchstick man being cut up with a knife.

The message appears to have been in reference to the near-fatal stabbing of the police chief of the southern city of Passau, Alois Mannichl, two weeks ago by a suspected neo-Nazi. Mannichl was stabbed in the stomach at his front door and survived after emergency surgery. His attacker is still at-large.

A spokesman for the police in the city of Schwerin, which is responsible for Gossel's protection, said: "We are treating this as a serious threat that refers directly to the attack on Mannichl."

"I was shocked," Gossel told SPIEGEL ONLINE. He said he wanted to spend the next few days away from Warin and would visit friends.

The threat may be linked to a dispute between Gossel and the obscure Interim Partei Deutschland (IPD) party, which Germany's domestic intelligence agency says has links with right-wing extremism. The agency has been monitoring the IPD for some time. The party rejects the legitimacy of the Federal Republic of Germany, and its chairman, Edgar Romano Ludowici, has described himself as "Reich interior minister of the exile government of the Second German Reich in the borders of 1937."

Gossel criticized the IPD after it purchased a house in Warin last summer. He also campaigned against the party's setting up offices in the town because he was worried it would use the property as a training center.

The attack on Passau's police chief has raised fears that Germany's far-right scene is becoming more brazen -- and violent. Recent figures show that the number of far-right crimes committed in the first 10 months of 2008 exceeded the total for the whole of last year. A report in Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper last week said the German intererior ministry had registered 11,928 such crimes by the end of October, a rise of almost 30 percent relative to the same time period last year and exceeding all of 2007's total of 9,206 crimes. The final figures will be released in early 2009.

Separately, the small Bavarian town of Gräfenberg says it is being terrorized by neo-Nazis from outside town who have been staging demonstrations there for the past two years.

The next such rally was set for Wednesday, New Year's Eve, but was prohibited by the regional authority which said it would be too dangerous for the demonstrators given all the New Year's fireworks in circulation.

The far-right protestors have been offered an alternative date of January 10 for their march. That would be the 35th neo-Nazi demonstration in the town since November 2006. The town council is involved in a protracted dispute with far-right campaigners because it has refused them access to a local war memorial.

For the past two years, demonstrators wearing combat boots, many with their faces concealed by hoods, scarves or sunglasses, have regularly marched through Gräfenberg holding burning torches and beating drums in menacing scenes that evoke Nazi-era rallies.

A local citizen's group co-founded by Gräfenberg Mayor Werner Wolf has made headlines by waging a colorful campaign to counter the far-right protestors, for example, by playing loud Samba music and running deafening motorized saws to drown out their speeches.

Mayor Wolf said last month that, in recent years, he and other members of the Citizen's Forum organizing the counter-demonstrations had received anonymous threats.

He received an e-mail, for example, stating that "those who fight us must expect to get hurt," and he had a bag of paint hurled at his house. The names and photos of fellow campaigners had been published on far-right leaflets, said Wolf, and demonstrations had been held in front of their homes.

Spiegel

Emmanuel's Web

From his base in Brussels, a Belgian webmaster is running some of Europe's leading hate sites. He also may be breaking the law.

On a beautiful day in northern Germany in the summer of 2002, two notorious white supremacists sat down at a picnic table to eat vanilla ice cream.

David Duke, the former Klan leader turned anti-Semitic superstar of the global radical right, sat across from Nick Griffin, the head of the white supremacist British National Party (BNP). Joining Duke and Griffin were a young female BNP supporter from the United Kingdom, Griffin's wife, and a little-known Belgian man in his early 30s by the name of Emmanuel Brun d'Aubignosc.

There's no record of the conversation that accompanied the ice cream. But it's a good bet that website technology came up. D'Aubignosc at the time was a longtime computer expert and professional website designer, as well as a self-proclaimed white nationalist.

Since he met with Duke and Griffin in 2002, d'Aubignosc ("dee-ah-ben-yosc") has become a major behind-the-scenes promoter of white nationalist ideology in more than a dozen countries, an Intelligence Report investigation has revealed.

According to international website registry records and d'Aubignosc's own statements on the white supremacist online forum Stormfront, he is the chief website manager, or "webmaster," for several high-profile white nationalist organizations, including the British National Party; the French white nationalist group Le Mouvement Social et Patriotique; and the National Front, a far-right anti-immigrant political party in France. The National Front's leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, personally tasked d'Aubignosc with creating a pan-European white nationalist web presence at a meeting last year in Paris, according to a statement d'Aubignosc posted online under his code name, Indutiomar, which is apparently a reference to the first century Celtic general Indutiomarus.

D'Aubignosc also administers a multinational "whites only" dating service called Eurodatelink and a network of white nationalist electronic newsletters for readers in 16 European countries, as well as the United States and Canada. D'Aubignosc promotes this network, dubbed Altermedia, as "World Wide News for People of European Descent."

But d'Aubignosc's most vital role in the global white nationalist movement is that of David Duke's personal webmaster. D'Aubignosc designs, manages, and regularly updates Duke's official website and that of the Duke-led hate group, EURO (European American Unity and Rights Organization).

D'Aubignosc also does business with Chris Evans, a former unit commander for the neo-Nazi organization National Alliance and marketing director for the Alliance's hate-rock company Resistance Records. Evans now lives in Texas, where he runs AryanWear, a leading white supremacist clothing and merchandise company. Website registry records list Evans as the United States administrative contact for Eurodate.

Also, Evans is the North American contact for Upsylon, a web hosting and E-commerce consulting firm owned by d'Aubignosc. Upsylon is based in Brussels, Belgium, where d'Aubignosc also maintains a residence.

Because he lives and works in Belgium, d'Aubignosc's white nationalist website management may violate that country's strict anti-hate speech laws, which prohibit residents of Belgium from distributing propaganda that "incites discrimination, hatred, segregation or violence" against a person or group "on account of race, color, origin, or national or ethnic descent."

The fact that d'Aubignosc is distributing racist and anti-Semitic materials online rather than passing out leaflets in the street affords him scant legal protection, according to Frederick Banson, spokesperson for the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, a European Union agency that monitors racism and xenophobia and advises EU member nations on prosecuting hate crimes.

"Last June, two webmasters of the [Islamist] web site 'Assabyle.com' in Belgium were sentenced to ten months imprisonment and a fine of 15,000 Euros [about $19,000] for acts of anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial, and incitement to racial hate," said Banson. "Also in June 2006, the leaders of the French-speaking extreme right-wing party 'Mouvement de la Nation' were sentenced to six months for distributing materials online containing incitements to racial discrimination, so there already exists strong case precedent for successful prosecutions [of racist and anti-Semitic webmasters]."

Banson would not reveal whether his agency is aware of d'Aubignosc's white nationalist activism, or whether an investigation of d'Aubignosc is underway. "I am not at liberty to discuss or provide any data we may or may not have concerning a third party," he said.

D'Aubignosc did not reply to five E-mails or three voicemail messages left over a two-week period in late February and early March, seeking comment for this story.

Compared to limelight-seekers like Duke, Griffin and Le Pen, d'Aubignsoc remains an obscure figure in the white nationalist movement. His online postings reveal little about his personal background. According to a letter d'Aubignosc sent to Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin in March 2004 protesting the detention of Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel, d'Aubignosc's mother married the Canadian ambassador to Belgium when d'Aubignosc was 7 years old. "Canada soon became like a second fatherland to me," he wrote.

In October 2003, d'Aubignosc posted to Stormfront, "I have been working hard to unite all people from European descent wherever they may live." In May 2004, he published a report on Altermedia about David Duke's homecoming party after Duke was released from federal prison after serving a year for ripping off supporters. In that post, d'Aubignosc wrote that he had first met Duke in Europe in January 2000 and then visited Duke in Louisiana in May 2000.

D'Aubignosc then launched into an anti-Semitic screed.

"White nationalism is about respect and our willingness to make sure that our children will have a safe place to live protected from the curses of multiculturalism," he wrote. "Our enemies are the vicious people who hate black people so much they have been using them to destroy us by miscegenation or 'racial mixing' which is a form of genocide for us. They are the people who lie, lie, lie to drive America into wars of Israeli conquest. They are the people who deny every nation the right to its own secure living space, while, at the same time, they demand that same space for their own people. They are the ones who plunder American and European taxpayers to subsidize their own terrorist state. They are the ones who poison our children's minds with MTV. They are the people who sell our women on the meat markets of forced prostitution and pornography on the streets of Jerusalem."

While legal in the United States, publishing such vitriol could get a man into big trouble in Belgium, or any other EU country with harsh anti-hate speech laws.

As d'Aubignosc wrote in November 2006 in an article for Altermedia celebrating British National Party leader Griffin's acquittal on hate speech charges, "In Europe, we do not have free speech, and we have to be very careful about what we say and about the words we use."

If the recent cases in his home country are any indication, the Belgian webmaster better hope he's been careful enough.

Southern Poverty Law Center