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Old February 13th, 2008 #1
Alex Linder
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'Germany's Neo-Nazi Party Is in Self-Destruct Mode'

With the arrest of the NPD party's national treasurer on Thursday, things are looking increasingly grim for the far-right organization. Cooked books, poor finances and internal corruption are all leading to self-strangulation. Good riddance, say German newspapers.

Police in Berlin raided the national headquarters of the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD) on Thursday, following the arrest of the organization's national treasurer, Erwin Kemna, earlier that morning on suspicion of embezzlement.


Erwin Kemna, the far-right NPD party's national treasurer, was arrested on Thursday on suspicion of embezzeling hundreds of thousands of euros since 2004. If found guilty, he faces up to ten years in prison.

Kemna was detained in the western German city of Münster Thursday morning on suspicion of siphoning off €627,000 ($913,500) since 2004 from the party's funds solely for personal use. If found guilty, he faces between five and 10 years in prison.

Kemna's arrest comes at a time when the far-right party has been facing grave financial troubles, federal investigations (more...), and a demand from the Bundestag that the party repay €870,000 in defrauded funds.

A recent leak of internal documents to SPIEGEL ONLINE (more...) revealed that the party had "not enough membership revenue and only a few financial backers," and that there were deep divisions within the party. Another threat to the NPD coffers is a recent move by the 16 German interior ministers (more...) to halt state funding to organizations and foundations that espouse the party's rightist views.

Thursday's raid and the arrest of the NPD treasurer come as additional blows, and it has German newspapers buzzing with talk on Friday about how the NPD doesn't need to be outlawed to go away; it seems to be doing that just fine on its own.

The conservative newspaper Die Welt writes:

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"The state prosecutors' actions come too late. A former party member had already informed the press of illegal practices in November."

"It's apparently not only the finances of the NPD that are in bad shape. The leadership is thin, and among the few functionaries that do exist, there is hopeless division. They cannot agree on whether or not they should cooperate with their violence-prone comrades. The NPD has seats in the state parliaments in both Dresden and Schwerin, where its members' vulgar behaviour and agitation is met with displeasure. But that's not a danger to democracy. A stronger rule of law, which has just shown its teeth, is what permits such groups to exist, even if they do propagate the 'Volksland' and the 'superiority of the white race.' Banning them would just make them into martyrs. But now we have real reason to hope that the brown swamp will finally dry out on its own."

The center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung writes:

"For years brave democrats have been looking for the right switch to turn off the NPD. They have never found it. But now the NPD is doing so by itself: the neo-Nazi party has switched into self-destruct mode."

"The reports floating around -- of financial irregularities, dubious accounting, fake receipts, account statements filled with miscalculations, cooked books and bank accounts, made-up expenditures, disappeared government subsidies -- all now culminate in the arrest of the party's national treasurer on charges of embezzlement and fraud. He is said to have siphoned off hundreds of thousands of euros from party funds for himself. If this is a typical practice for other members of the party (and it looks like it), then the party is suffocating all by itself. There's nothing to object to in that."

-- R. Jay Magill Jr. 12:00pm, CET

http://www.spiegel.de/international/...534005,00.html

Last edited by Alex Linder; February 13th, 2008 at 12:32 AM.