Germany Reports 27% Rise in Racist Attacks in 1997

Racist attacks by far-right extremists in Germany surged by more than a quarter in 1997 after declining steadily in recent years, the government said Wednesday.

The federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution said in its annual report on militant groups that the number of racist and anti-Semitic acts of violence jumped 27% to 790 incidents. The attacks included 13 cases of attempted manslaughter and 677 assaults.

The total number of rightist criminal acts--including spreading outlawed propaganda and using illegal symbols such as the swastika--shot up 34%.

The report came less than two weeks after the far-right German People’s Union shocked the nation by becoming the most successful far-right party in Germany since World War II. It won nearly 13% of the vote in an election in the depressed eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt.

“It is a discouraging development,” Interior Minister Manfred Kanther said of the 194-page report.

“We have to remain on alert. We will fight extremists on the far right as well as the far left, without any letup at all, and we will win,” he told a news conference.

The report estimated that right-wing radicals in Germany saw their ranks swell by 7% last year, to 48,400. The number of hard-core extremists deemed capable of violence climbed by 19%, to 7,600.

The watchdog agency gave no specific explanation for the trend. But opposition leaders blamed the surge in far-right violence on the government’s failure to combat record postwar unemployment, now nearly 13%, and the widening gap between rich and poor.

“The alarming development in right-wing extremism is a challenge for our state and our society,” said Hertha Daeubler-Gmelin, legal affairs expert for the opposition Social Democrats.

“The reasons are obvious even though Kanther is ignoring them--large parts of our society have been made deliberately poor, and many are afraid of being disenfranchised in a changing world.”

Wolfgang Schaeuble, the leader in Parliament of Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democrats, said the government would work hard to educate voters about the far right. But he blamed the media for contributing to the anti-foreigner sentiment that helped the German People’s Union.

Racist attacks, especially in formerly Communist eastern Germany, surged after unification with the west, and more than 30 people were killed in the early 1990s.

But violence had been falling for several years since a government crackdown in 1993.