Germany Acts to Curb Extremists : Violence: Reacting to intense public pressure, authorities crack down for the first time. Neo-Nazi group is banned and right-wing conference, demonstration are barred.

Reacting to intense domestic and international pressure, German authorities Friday moved forcefully for the first time against a wave of right-wing extremism that has claimed 16 lives so far this year, spread fear among the country’s 6 million foreigners and reawakened the ghosts of Germany’s Nazi past.

Friday’s actions ended months of government paralysis in the face of steadily escalating violence. Among the day’s developments:

* The federal government announced a ban on a small but virulent neo-Nazi party called the National Front, in what Interior Minister Rudolf Seiters called “an important political signal against right-wing extremist agitation and violence.” It was the first time since the outbreak of attacks against foreigners and Jewish targets began nearly two years ago that the government has banned a rightist extremist political group.

“Today’s step will be followed by further measures,” Seiters said.

* In a move of potentially greater significance, the Hannover regional government said it had banned a statewide party conference planned by the right-wing Republikaner Party for today in the city, saying it represented a threat to public order.

The Republikaners, headed by a former SS noncommissioned officer named Franz Schoenhuber, constitute a significant political force in Germany. They won nearly 11% of the vote in last April’s Baden-Wuerttemberg state election, claim 22,000 members nationally and have gathered new strength with the swing of the German public mood to the right.

* Police in the southeastern city of Cottbus announced a ban on a demonstration by two right-wing extremist groups planned for today in the nearby town of Calau on similar grounds, that it constituted a threat to public order.

* Federal Prosecutor Alexander von Stahl, active for the first time since German unification in cases involving right-wing extremists, formally opened investigations into the activities of 10 people arrested Wednesday on suspicion of operating as a right-wing terrorist gang. Those in custody range in age from 15 to 19, authorities said.

The series of official crackdowns came on an emotion-filled day in which more than 10,000 people crowded into a square in central Hamburg to attend a memorial service for a 51-year-old Turkish woman and two Turkish girls, ages 10 and 14, who died last Monday in a right-wing arson attack.

The woman had lived in Germany for two decades, and the 10-year-old was born in the country.

The shock of that attack, the first against members of Germany’s large, long-established and well-integrated Turkish community, seemed to jolt Chancellor Helmut Kohl and his government into action. The incident also seemed to generate an important shift in the public mood here, evoking an almost tangible national wave of revulsion.

The majority of the estimated 1,800 right-wing extremist attacks recorded so far this year have been directed against so-called asylum-seekers, those entering the country under Germany’s liberal political asylum law.

Resentment is high against these foreigners, who are viewed mainly as outside opportunists seeking a free slice of Germany’s hard-won affluence at a time when Germans can no longer afford it. Attacks against them have brought words of sympathy, but little official action.

Although ethnic tensions between Turks and Germans have arisen from time to time, the 1.8 million Turkish nationals here are widely accepted and generally respected for their contribution to the country’s economic prosperity.

Unlike the asylum-seekers, the Turkish community in Germany also enjoys political clout, both through the Turkish government, which officially protested the killings, and through the strength of its numbers. Reflecting this, several top German officials attended Friday’s memorial service, including two members of Kohl’s Cabinet, Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel and Labor Minister Norbert Bluem.

“We want democracy and human dignity, we don’t want old Nazis or neo-Nazis,” Bluem said into a megaphone.

The president of the Schleswig-Holstein state Parliament, Ute Erdsiek-Rave, said, “I am ashamed for my country and I ask forgiveness on behalf of all those who don’t have the opportunity to do so personally.”

The three victims died in the town of Moelln, which is located in Schleswig-Holstein. A 25-year-old man was arrested in connection with the case.

The country’s two main evening news broadcasts carried extensive coverage of both the memorial service and the Interior Ministry’s move against the National Front.

A 1991 Interior Ministry report lists the National Front as one of 76 right-wing extremist organizations known to be operating in Germany. The report said the group was founded in 1985, and in 1991 had about 130 members.

“Through their constant agitation, right-wing extremist organizations create and fuel a mood of xenophobia,” Seiters said in a prepared statement accompanying announcement of the ban. “The state cannot and will not tolerate this.”

He described the National Front as an organization dedicated to the overthrow of the constitutional order.

“Its goal is, above all, to attack human dignity,” Seiters said. “Foreigners, asylum-seekers and members of minority groups are consistently defamed. In its publications, the National Front has spread anti-Semitism.”

Police raids began immediately on homes of many of the party members to confiscate party property.

Interior Ministry chief spokesman Roland Bachmeier said Friday’s action and a pledge to ban other rightist groups had not changed the underlying assessment of law enforcement officials that the majority of attacks were the work of small, loosely formed groups of young people, often acting spontaneously.

Further assaults against foreigners Friday seemed to fall into this category.

In the Ruhr mining town of Gelsenkirchen, for example, police arrested three youths, ages 14 and 15, in connection with an arson attack against an apartment building housing Yugoslav refugees, while in the nearby town of Vreden, two drunken men, 22 and 24, were taken into custody after attempting to set fire to a home for asylum-seekers.