• Home /
• Statewatch Database /
• Germany: Racist attacks

Germany: Racist attacks

01 July 1992

Three German neo-nazi youths have been jailed for between three and a half and five years for taking part in a petrol bomb attack on a refugee hostel in Hunxe, on the lower Rhine. The petrol bombs exploded in a bedroom seriously injuring two young Lebanese girls. Seinab Saado, 8, barely survived the attack; she is left terribly scarred and her lungs are permanently damaged. Her six year old sister, Mokadas, also suffered severe burns. The public prosecutor in the case had recommended a sentence of 9 years, but the judge demurred, arguing that it could not be proved that the attack was meant to kill.

In June policemen in riot gear surrounded three refugee hostels near Freiberg, south west of Dresden and screamed racist abuse before storming the hostels. Several children as well as adults were injured in the raid. The raid was justified by the Chief of Police who cited German anxieties about the criminality of foreigners.

While the number of attacks on refugee hostels has declined in recent months there has been an increase in street attacks on black people. A Vietnamese worker, Nguyen Tu, was stabbed to death by neo-nazi skinheads, in front of dozens of onlookers, near Berlin. A Nigerian man who was attacked in Wendisch Rietz, 30 miles east of Berlin, and beaten unconscious before being thrown in a lake, is still fighting for his life.

One of the few responses to these attacks is the establishment of government backed re-education centres for neo-Nazi offenders, such as the Roots project in Marzahn, Berlin, which sees the fascists as "victims" in need of rehabilitation. Anti-fascists have pointed out that these centres are helping to facilitate racist violence rather than prevent it.