Germany Bans Right-Wing Group; Turks Close Shops : Violence: Arsonists set fire to a house where foreigners live near Darmstadt, police say. No one is hurt.

Germany banned a fifth neo-Nazi party Friday as arsonists struck at a foreigners’ hostel overnight and Turkish shops closed to protest racist attacks.

Police in Bavaria raided the property of some 40 members of the far-right National Bloc, seizing propaganda, two loaded starting pistols and a baseball bat, an Interior Ministry spokesman said.

The ministry had ruled that the 2-year-old party, set up by the late neo-Nazi leader Michael Kuehnen, was anti-constitutional, anti-foreigner and aggressively racist.

Kuehnen, the most prominent figure in Germany’s violent neo-Nazi fringe, had likened himself to Adolf Hitler before dying of AIDS at the age of 35 in April, 1991.

“We are determined to tear out the roots of rightist extremism,” Interior Ministry official Guenther Beckstein said.

Right-wing German militants have launched almost nightly firebombings and other arson attacks against foreigners’ homes since five Turkish women and children were killed by fire on May 29 in the western city of Solingen--united Germany’s worst racist attack.

In Berlin, home of Germany’s biggest Turkish community, thousands of Turkish shops shut for an hour Friday to protest the Solingen attack.

Zuhtu Deniz, chairman of the Turkish entrepreneurs’ association, said many German shops had also been among the 4,000 to 5,000 that closed their doors while a protest rally took place.

Arsonists in Modautal-Ernsthofen, near Darmstadt, doused clothes with gasoline and set them ablaze on the staircase of the second floor of a house where foreigners lived, police said.

No one was injured. One resident spotted the fire on his way to a communal toilet in the early hours and alerted others.

German officials banned four neo-Nazi parties in quick succession after a firebombing killed three Turks in the northern city of Moelln last November.

Elsewhere in Europe, police in Perpignan said Friday that vandals uprooted 86 Jewish gravestones and smashed a Holocaust memorial plaque in a cemetery outside the southwestern French town.

And in the western Danish port of Juelsminde, police said Friday that arsonists burned down most of a tent camp built for refugees from the former Yugoslav federation. No one was living at the camp at the time of the early morning attack.