Neo Nazi

BERLIN -- The ersatz fuehrer snarled through a rantin Hitlerite speech in his fake Berchtesgaden.His name was Thomas Dienel. He was the self-made gauleiter of the neo-Nazi German National Party.He snaked through the obscenities of anti-Semitism, xenophobic nationalism and racist hate. His performance was a rancid compound of bad acting, psychological compulsion and empty bravado.Three somewhat sheepish-looking police officers sat among Dienel's leather-jacketed followers, recording the speech.

MELK, Austria -- The event was supposed to be a sign of Austria's new way of dealing with its Nazi past. Nearly 50 years after the last slave laborers left the vast underground munitions works in the caverns near this small town, the federal government decided to turn the area into a memorial.Only 24 hours after the opening ceremony in mid-May, however, visitors found the cave walls were covered with neo-Nazi graffiti. Embarrassed officials closed the memorial and cleaned the walls.It turned out that a paramilitary fascist organization had used the caverns for years with local officials' tacit approval.

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)

Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal, 81, a concentration-camp survivor, was responsible for finding Adolf Eichmann, as well as the SS officer who arrested Anne Frank. In "Justice Not Vengeance" (Grove Weidenfeld), he tells his life story.Q: Why have you devoted your life to bringing Nazis to justice?A: When I was liberated, I didn't know that my wife was alive. I thought I had no one left in the world and that there was no reason for me to live. Then I learned about the War Crimes Office. It was a chance for me to help.

THE question about Europe now is what is more dangerous -- the eruptions of the same old murderous hatreds or the eruptions of the same old attempts to explain, rationalize or excuse them.Sooner or later, Americans will have to pay attention. European nastinesses have a way of involving the United States and so do European evasions of the truth. Sooner would be better -- say before Election Day.Take Germany, please. In a half-dozen cities, Nazis -- plain Nazis, there is no such thing as a neo-Nazi -- smash and burn in riot against foreign refugees and job-seekers.

BERLIN -- Fifty years ago yesterday, Hans and Sophie Scholl, two young students condemned for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets, died on a Gestapo guillotine.Their contemporaries say the Scholls, brother and sister, helped launch a revolution in German thinking -- a sense of individual political responsibility that now counterbalances tendencies toward violence or blind nationalism.Though initially despised by many of their fellow citizens (and little-known outside Germany), the Scholls have become near-mythic heroes to postwar Germans.

Federal agents and police last night raided an East Baltimore apartment described as headquarters for a neo-Nazi hate group, seized four high-powered assault weapons and 2,000 rounds of ammunition and arrested three alleged leaders of the group.More than 30 officers raided the second-floor apartment in a brick rowhouse in the 100 block of N. East Ave. about 6 p.m.,minutes after police arrested two of the apartment's residents after stopping a car in which they were traveling on nearby Eastern Avenue.

BONN, Germany -- More than 100,000 people crowded int this city's main park yesterday to voice solidarity with Germany's foreign population in the latest of a series of mass protests in the country against right-wing extremist violence.Rallying under the motto "Now Is the Time," a handful of international human rights activists joined an array of personalities, primarily from the German political left, to denounce attacks against foreigners and demand that the country's liberal law on political asylum be left unchanged.

BERLIN -- Late last year, the full weight of German constitutional law came down upon the neo-Nazi organization German Alternative and its leader, a pink-cheeked young man named Frank Hubner. The group was banned. As far as the authorities were concerned, another embarrassing voice of intolerance had been silenced.Apparently someone forgot to tell Mr. Hubner.There he was again Tuesday night, facing an audience of 50 people and five television cameras in a public library in eastern Germany.

NEW YORK -- For six months, Israeli free-lance journalist Yaron Svoray, working for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, infiltrated a number of neo-Nazi groups in Germany.Yesterday, Mr. Svoray surfaced at a news conference sponsored by the Wiesenthal Center to describe his experiences and to assess the strength of the German neo-Nazis and their skinhead partners.Mr. Svoray, a former police detective in Israel, used the alias Ron Furey to pose as an Australian journalist seeking to interview leaders of Germany's neo-Nazi movement for a non-existent rightist publication.