Demokratins högborg Tyskland slår ner på nationalister

BERLIN (AP) — More than 900 police officers raided homes and clubhouses of suspected neo-Nazis in a crackdown in a western German state on Thursday, seizing far-right propaganda material, computer hard drives and a wide variety of weapons, the region’s top security official said.

At the headquarters of one of the groups in Dortmund, officials found 1,000 election posters for the National Democratic Party, which federal officials are currently trying to decide whether to ban, Jaeger said.

The raids to collect evidence came after North Rhine-Westphalia state interior minister Ralf Jaeger banned three local neo-Nazi groups.

[...]

The crackdown in North Rhine-Westphalia comes amid a greater focus nationally on the far right in Germany. That was sparked by the revelation last year that a small group of neo-Nazis apparently managed to kill nine minorities and a police officer over a seven-year period while remaining off the radar of the country’s intelligence services.

[...]

In a report released last month by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, officials estimated that the wider membership of neo-Nazi groups in Germany fell to 22,400 last year from 25,000 in 2010, but the number of far-right extremists prepared to use violence grew to 9,800 from 9,500.

[...]

At the headquarters of one of the groups in Dortmund, officials found 1,000 election posters for the National Democratic Party, which federal officials are currently trying to decide whether to ban, Jaeger said.

[...]

The state has seen a rise in far-right crimes this year, and had already conducted widespread raids in April and May.

“We have dealt the neo-Nazi scene in North Rhine-Westphalia a hard blow,” Jaeger said of Thursday’s raids. “We have ripped a big hole in the neo-Nazi network."