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East German Communists confront their guilty secret: anti-Semitism |
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Written by The Independent (UK)
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Saturday, 14 April 2007 11:00 |
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East German Communists confront their guilty secret: anti-Semitism “Communist East Germany officially took pride in its "anti-fascism" yet party youth members used Nazi salutes, the Holocaust was virtually ignored and Jewish cemeteries were flattened to make way for car parks. A dark and little known aspect of East Germany emerged yesterday at a Berlin exhibition which exposes the communist state's role in creating a fertile breeding ground for anti-Semitism, right-wing violence and xenophobia. Entitled "We never had any of that " in an ironic reference to the official Communist Party boast that East Germany was Nazi- free, the exhibition is the result of eight months' research by historians and pupils in provincial archives. Annette Kahane, head of the Berlin-based Amadeu foundation, which organised the project, said yesterday: "The exhibition's findings do a lot to explain why extreme right-wing political parties and right-wing violence have grown in the east since reunification." More than 100 people have been killed by xenophobic far-right violence - much of it in the east - since Germany reunified in 1990…”
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