Neo Nazi

History played a macabre trick on Germany when the Berlin Wall fell three years ago on the same date -- November 9 -- that Nazi thugs went on the 1938 Kristallnacht rampage against Jews that anticipated the Holocaust. Both events go to the heart of the German dilemma: how to deal with an ugly past and a present in which the high hopes of reunification have been replaced by rightwing attacks on foreigners and anything Jewish.There was a whiff of Weimar in what happened this week when political leaders tried to mark this double anniversary by leading a protest against a mounting crisis enflamed by their own dithering.

Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me? Baloney! Social scientists, along with those invested in the field of mental health, have determined through respected documentation that verbal battering is no less harmful in its literal destruction of the mind as is physical abuse to the body. So there you go on the editorial page, defending Pastor Fred Phelps' right to express his organization's venomous tirades, even at the funerals of our military sons and daughters, clearly orchestrated to do irreparable harm ("Free speech is paramount," March 13)

ATLANTA -- More than 30 of the nation's most radical right-wing militias and an Idaho-based neo-Nazi group with a history of violence have simultaneously launched intelligence-gathering operations aimed at government agencies, civil rights organizations and the media, according to a civil rights organization.The move, coming on the heels of the April 19 Oklahoma City bombing, has alarmed experts who monitor the radical right. They say they fear that a coordinated intelligence network could lay the groundwork for a "jihad"-style campaign of terror directed at individuals and agencies seen as enemies by the groups.

WASHINGTON - An elderly Maryland man with a long history of ties to neo-Nazi organizations walked into the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on Wednesday and opened fire, killing a security guard, law enforcement officials said. The shooter was shot in the face by museum security and was in critical condition Wednesday night at a Washington hospital, according to The Washington Post. An FBI official said the shooter had been identified as James W. von Brunn, who was described by the Anti-Defamation League and other followers of hate groups as a longtime white supremacist and anti-Semite.

LINCOLN, Neb. -- This town is too white and too prosperous for national socialist agitation, the Farm Belt Fuehrer says over a lunch of fried rice and pork satay at a downtown restaurant."

BERLIN -- Chancellor Helmut Kohl stood ashen and gra before the German Parliament this week with his head bowed in silent mourning for a Turkish woman and two girls killed by neo-Nazi terrorists.It was an extraordinarily ironic image. The chancellor could have been mourning his own lost popularity. Two years ago he rose before Parliament in buoyant celebration, the chancellor of the reunification of Germany, perhaps then the most popular leader of Germany since World War II.Reunification promised joy and freedom and prosperity.

There are two schools of thought. One thinks the ticket should be Powell-Ripken . . .Police excess is police excess, whether the officer is local or federal, the setting is urban or rural, the victim is black street hoodlum or white neo-Nazi gun nut.

BONN, Germany -- They are the hate crimes that no one seems to read or hear about in a unified Germany:A blond teen-ager who can see Poland from his back yard pores over a crude Nazi comic book that shrilly demands a "pure" Germany free of foreign "filth."In big cities and small villages alike, right-wing extremists prowl the streets at night, furtively plastering swastika stickers with anti-Semitic slogans on light poles and walls.Young people at underground rock concerts and neo-Nazi rallies sport SS armbands and wave SS banners recalling the Nazi elite force of World War II; the more literate ones read "Mein Kampf" and listen to tapes of Adolf Hitler's speeches.

Germany is such an easy candidate for a national guilt trip that the outside world, in reacting to escalating racist violence there, should be careful not to play into the hands of neo-Nazi extremists. This is well understood by the Israeli government, which has condemned hate crimes against Jews and foreigners but has drawn the line when it comes to punitive measures against the vast German majority striving to safeguard democracy.There can be little doubt that Germany is in a state of psychological crisis after the fire-bomb killing of two Turkish girls and a grandmother last month caused international outrage.

HBO Pictures seldom miss."Barbarians at the Gate," "Citizen Cohn," "Somebody Has to Shoot the Picture" have all been worth going out of your way to see."The Infiltrator," a new HBO film premiering at 8 tonight, is not in that class. But it's definitely worth a look and better than most made-for-TV movies premiering on a Saturday night in June.It's an intelligent film that combines action, good technical quality and some exceptional acting. But, in the final analysis, it's a thriller that fizzles instead of sizzles down the homestretch, a setup without much of a punch line.

JERUSALEM -- With eight young immigrants from the former Soviet Union under arrest, Israeli authorities said yesterday that they had broken up a violent neo-Nazi gang that desecrated synagogues and staged at least 15 attacks on religious Jews, Asian workers, drug addicts and homosexuals. The news shocked Israelis, whose state was founded in part as a refuge for Jews in the aftermath of the Nazi Holocaust. Video said to have been taken by the skinhead gang to document its beatings was shown at yesterday's Cabinet meeting, triggering urgent debate over what to do about immigrants who came as Jewish offspring but grew up to commit hate crimes and shout, "Heil Hitler!"

Anne Arundel County Executive Janet S. Owens and eight other top county officials condemned a white supremacist group yesterday for its recent distribution of racist literature and the airing of a hate video on a public access channel. The joint statement followed the discovery of a flurry of racist, anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant fliers within the past month in several county neighborhoods. County leaders recently established a group to monitor and respond to such incidents. County officials said the fliers and the video were distributed by the National Alliance, a neo-Nazi organization based in West Virginia.

An article about online hate groups in yesterday's Plugged In section contained an outdated address for Raymond A. Franklin's Hate Directory Web site. The authorized site is located at http: //www.bcpl.net/(tilde)rfrankli/ hatedir.htm.The Sun regrets the error.The conference room in Ocean City is jammed with more than 100 people, all peering at an enlarged computer screen displaying an ominous image: a man in a white hood holding a pump shotgun.It's one of dozens of Ku Klux Klan sites on the World Wide Web, but the people studying it aren't hatemongers.

MOSCOW -- The U.S. Embassy warned Americans of African and Asian descent to beware of violent neo-Nazi thugs after a black Marine was beaten by a group of skinheads this weekend at a popular outdoor market.Yesterday, Moscow police arrested one of the assailants, who by chance was interviewed by a Russian television crew moments after the incident and bragged that he often beats black people on the city's streets."To be honest with you, they just seem to be attracted to my fists like metal to a magnet," said the man, who gave his name as "Boose" and displayed his bloody knuckles for the camera.

IN MID-JANUARY, a parliamentary inquiry in Bonn began meeting behind closed doors to determine the extent of neo-Nazi activity inside Germany's 320,000-member army, the Bundeswehr. According to the army's own figures, the number of neo-Nazi incidents among soldiers tripled during the past year.At the Franz-Josef-Strauss barracks in Bavaria, soldiers celebrated Hitler's birthday by chanting Nazi hymns and viewing Third Reich propaganda films. "It was clear to me that some of our superiors wanted to instill in us young soldiers the traditions of the Wehrmacht," Hitler's armed forces, a former trainee told Stern magazine.

ATLANTA -- More than 30 of the nation's most radical right-wing militias and an Idaho-based neo-Nazi group with a history of violence have simultaneously launched intelligence-gathering operations aimed at government agencies, civil rights organizations and the media, according to a civil rights organization.The move, coming on the heels of the April 19 Oklahoma City bombing, has alarmed experts who monitor the radical right. They say they fear that a coordinated intelligence network could lay the groundwork for a "jihad"-style campaign of terror directed at individuals and agencies seen as enemies by the groups.

IN MID-JANUARY, a parliamentary inquiry in Bonn began meeting behind closed doors to determine the extent of neo-Nazi activity inside Germany's 320,000-member army, the Bundeswehr. According to the army's own figures, the number of neo-Nazi incidents among soldiers tripled during the past year.At the Franz-Josef-Strauss barracks in Bavaria, soldiers celebrated Hitler's birthday by chanting Nazi hymns and viewing Third Reich propaganda films. "It was clear to me that some of our superiors wanted to instill in us young soldiers the traditions of the Wehrmacht," Hitler's armed forces, a former trainee told Stern magazine.

There are two schools of thought. One thinks the ticket should be Powell-Ripken . . .Police excess is police excess, whether the officer is local or federal, the setting is urban or rural, the victim is black street hoodlum or white neo-Nazi gun nut.