Rightist Violence Insurmountable, German Official Says

Right-wing violence has taken root in Germany and the problem is insurmountable, “but that’s normal,” a top federal security official said Monday.

The Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the domestic intelligence agency responsible for monitoring the right-wing threat, is “overtaxed” by the most dangerous elements in the growing neo-Nazi skinhead scene, said Heinrich Sippel, the agency’s chief expert on right-wing extremism.

Experts estimate that the hard core of militant, potentially violent right-wingers has grown to 6,400 this year from 5,000 last year. More than 70% of them are under the age of 20.

More than 700 racist attacks have been reported since January, and eight people have died, including two women and three children killed in an arson attack against a Turkish family in nearby Solingen on May 29.

Another government expert on racist violence said Monday that the worst is yet to come.

“I am afraid that an avalanche has been unleashed which we can no longer stop,” said Hans-Dieter Schwind, head of a Bonn government commission on extremist violence. “It is probably already too late.

“My prediction is that it will get much worse, that this is just the beginning,” Schwind told German radio.

In another radio interview, the deputy chairman of the Police Union, Klaus Steffenhagen, declared that police lack the manpower and equipment to effectively combat the radical right wing.

The Office for the Protection of the Constitution counts 42,700 right-wing extremists in Germany and divides them into three categories:

* Organized right-wing political parties, which authorities consider nonviolent but whose individual members may occasionally engage in acts of violence on their own. Prosecutors say one of the Solingen suspects is a member of the far-right German People’s Union, which has scored small victories in some local and regional elections.

* Nonviolent neo-Nazis whose goal is to pattern modern German society after the Third Reich.

* Violent and potentially violent skinheads who may or may not have a primitive neo-Nazi ideology but remain unorganized, with no hierarchy.

The latter group is considered the most dangerous, and the most unreachable, in part because lenient laws dealing with youthful offenders limit prison sentences to 10 years for anyone under 18. Two of the four youths arrested in the Solingen deaths are 16.

While the influx of illegal economic refugees into Germany--about 438,000 last year--is often cited by experts as an underlying cause of right-wing violence, the bloodiest attacks to date have been against Turks who have lived here for decades and are legal residents.

A new asylum law passed last month is expected to choke off the flood of asylum-seekers, but reducing the number of potential targets for right-wing thugs won’t solve the problem either, the experts say.

German authorities are eager to repair an international image that many feel is being unfairly tarnished.

“It’s not just a German problem,” Sippel said, asserting that “England had 6,000 violent attacks against foreigners last year. . . . Every Western industrialized country can reckon on a potential base of more or less 15% extremism,” he said, “but that’s normal.”