Germany Seeks to Ban Extreme Right NPD

In the wake of a series of horrific murders in Germany of 10 people (mostly Turkish immigrants) by neo-Nazis, government state and federal interior minister are again seeking to ban the ultra-right National Party of Germany (NPD).

The murders, which also involved a Greek immigrant and a German policewoman, allegedly occurred between 2000 and 2007. The public became aware of this particular neo-Nazi only last month after the apparent suicides of two of the members, while a third member, a female, turned herself into police.

According to reports, a man arrested for assisting the trio, Ralf Wohlleben, is a former official with NPD.

Boris Rhein, the interior minister of Hessen, told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper that the NPD was inhuman, anti-democratic and anti-Semitic.

The NPD-ban needs to happen now, the state governor of Saxony-Anhalt Reiner Haseloff told the newspaper Bild.

That they have maintained contact with the militant scene seems evident to me. In short: a confident, watchful democracy must deal with this threat.

Ole Schröder, a senior Interior Ministry official and member Chancellor Angela Merkel's ruling conservative Christian Democrat party told daily newspaper Hamburger Abendblatt that Wohlleben’s connection to the terror cell should lead to a direct ban on the NPD.

The investigators must now analyze whether Wohlleben was involved in the… terror cell intrigues on order from the NPD, or with the party's knowledge, he said. Was it an action by a party or an individual crime -- this question will be decisive in the debate over an NPD ban.
However, a previous attempt to ban the NPD in 2003 was blocked by the federal constitutional court in 2003 over legal considerations. Among other things, it was revealed that police informants had infiltrated the NPD and even held senior positions in the organization.

Moreover, there are two NPD members who are members of parliaments of two states in eastern Germany, Saxony and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania according to Der Spiegel Online.

The NPD, which was formed in 1964, is believed to be the most prominent Nazi party in Germany since the fall of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich in 1945.